For this kind of problem, I'd suggest using an SQL formula in the business view column to create a lower case column (tick the 'formula is exact' box to make sure the formula is passed to the DB) or you can move the string manipulation to the reporting engine and use the native formulas in PRD or JavaScript in CDE. The formulas in Metadata editor are mostly for facilitating joins not data manipulation. I'm sure there's some other clever stuff that can be done with format masks to get similar results.