Function-based linguistic indexes
I work for an ISV. Since almost 10 years we are using function-based linguistic indexes in our application so that we get everything properly sorted.
At several client's site we have seen (and we see it again theses days) Oracle that do not take the proper indexes and perform poorly for some of our founctionnalities. For some reasons that are still not clear to me this bad behavior had occur 80-90% of the time on Oracle 10G Release 2. But it seem to occur also with Oracle 11G (on both release 1 and 2).
Until now, here is how (technically) we achieve this :