The UPPER function changes all characters to lower case. Case changes affect only letters. Spaces, numbers, special characters, and punctuation remain unchanged.
Format: UPPER(string)

Example:           UPPER('What is THAT?')

Result: ‘WHAT IS THAT?’

> Access does not support UPPER. Instead it uses UCASE.

> DB2 and MySQL support UPPER as well as UCASE.

> Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server support UPPER.

The TRIM function removes leading characters, trailing characters, or both from a character string or BLOB value.
If a removal character is not specified, spaces are removed by default. TRIM will not remove characters within a string. The COLLATE clause forces the result set into another pre-existing collating sequence.

Format:

TRIM([[{LEADING|TRAILING BOTH}] [remove_char] FROM source_string [COLLATE name])

Example:

TRIM(LEADING 'My name is ' FROM 'My name is William Diamond') Result: 'William Diamond'

TRIM(BOTH '---' FROM '---One Thousand Dollars---') Result: 'One Thousand Dollars'

TRIM(TRAILING 'Dollars---' FROM '---One Thousand Dollars---') Result: '---One Thousand '

> MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL support TRIM.

> The Access functions, TRIM(string), LTRIM(string), and RTRIM(string) are non-standard according to
ANSI standards.

> DB2 and SQL Server do not support TRIM. Instead they have LTRIM(string) and RTRIM(string).

> Oracle and PostgreSQL also have LPAD and RPAD to add spaces.

The TRANSLATE function changes the representation of a character string from one base character set to another character set and collation.

Format: TRANSLATE(value, USING translation_char_name)

> Access does not support TRANSLATE.

> DB2 does not support the TRANSLATE standard. It has TRANSLATE(source, replacement, match).

> MySQL does not support TRANSLATE. Instead, it uses the CONV function.

> Oracle supports the TRANSLATE standard, but it can only convert between the database character set and the national language character set.

> PostgreSQL does not support TRANSLATE. Instead, it uses its own non-standard TRANSLATE function.

> SQL Server does not support TRANSLATE. Instead, it uses its own non-standard CONVERT function.