General developer forum

Basically, I'd say the way you're doing it is "right", in that it will work reliably on supported databases (although not being the most pretty or efficient).  However, depending on the DBMS you're running on, you can set the collation of your database tables to be case insensitive, or use other tricks to make the DB behave in a case-insensitive way.

For example, with MySQL/MariaDB, I'd suggest using utf8_general_ci as your default collation (the ci stands for case insensitive).  You can also convert existing tables.