This was written for Oracle 9i use. Oracle 10g has more/better options available.

To allow for diacritic-insensitive searching using Oracle 9i you can create an index with Oracle Text. This gives you many other options as well. There are a few different index types, but this will just show the one. Here is the syntax:

CREATE INDEX [owner.index_name / for example MAS.LEADERNAME_CTX_IDX] ON [table_name]
([column_name])
INDEXTYPE IS CTXSYS.CONTEXT
PARAMETERS(’LEXER english_lexer’);