Depends on the context such as filenames on Mac which you link. There are many cases where doing it at the storage layer makes sense. Are you indexing text for

Depends on the context such as filenames on Mac which you link. There are many cases where doing it at the storage layer makes sense. Are you indexing text for search? Normalize. Do you want to de-duplicate textual data and store it in a database? Normalize. Are you going to run some sort of NLP analysis? Normalize.