Chris Fulstow's solution will work (+1), however, it may not be efficient, especially if your collection is very large. Non-rooted regular expressions (those not beginning with ^, which anchors the regular expression to the start of the string), and those using the i flag for case insensitivity will not use indexes, even if they exist.
An alternative option you might consider is to denormalize your data to store a lower-case version of the name field, for instance as name_lower. You can then query that efficiently (especially if it is indexed) for case-insensitive exact matches like:
MongoDB 3.4 now includes the ability to make a true case-insensitive index, which will dramtically increase the speed of case insensitive lookups on large datasets. It is made by specifying a collation with a strength of 2.
Probably the easiest way to do it is to set a collation on the database. Then all queries inherit that collation and will use it:
Regular expressions are slower than literal string matching. However, an additional lowercase field will increase your code complexity. When in doubt, use regular expressions. I would suggest to only use an explicitly lower-case field if it can replace your field, that is, you don't care about the case in the first place.
Note that you will need to escape the name prior to regex. If you want user-input wildcards, prefer appending .replace(/%/g, '.*') after escaping so that you can match "a%" to find all names starting with 'a'.
The following example creates a collection with no default collation, then adds an index on the name field with a case insensitive collation. International Components for Unicode
/*
* strength: CollationStrength.Secondary
* Secondary level of comparison. Collation performs comparisons up to secondary * differences, such as diacritics. That is, collation performs comparisons of
* base characters (primary differences) and diacritics (secondary differences). * Differences between base characters takes precedence over secondary
* differences.
*/
db.users.createIndex( { name: 1 }, collation: { locale: 'tr', strength: 2 } } )
To use the index, queries must specify the same collation.
db.users.insert( [ { name: "Oğuz" },
{ name: "oğuz" },
{ name: "OĞUZ" } ] )
// does not use index, finds one result
db.users.find( { name: "oğuz" } )
// uses the index, finds three results
db.users.find( { name: "oğuz" } ).collation( { locale: 'tr', strength: 2 } )
// does not use the index, finds three results (different strength)
db.users.find( { name: "oğuz" } ).collation( { locale: 'tr', strength: 1 } )
or you can create a collection with default collation:
Regex queries will be slower than index based queries.
You can create an index with specific collation as below db.collection.createIndex({field:1},{collation: {locale:'en',strength:2}},{background : true});
The above query will create an index that ignores the case of the string. The collation needs to be specified with each query so it uses the case insensitive index.