By default a MySQL column is case insensitive (although there are
some character sets that never are case insensitive). That means that if you
search with column like 'a%'; you will get all columns that start
with A or a. If you want to make this search case
sensitive use something like INDEX(column, "A")=0 to check a
prefix. Or STRCMP(column, "A") = 0 if the whole string should be
the same.
Simple compare operations >=, >, = , < , <=, sorting and
grouping are done on the characters 'sort value'. Characters with
the same sort value (like E, e and é) are treated as the same character!
LIKE comparing is done on the uppercase value of each character (E == e but E <> é)
If you want column to always be treated in a case sensitive manner,
declare it as BINARY. See section CREATE TABLE syntax..
If you are using Chinese data in the so-called big5 encoding you want to
make all character columns BINARY. This works because the sorting
order of big5 encoding characters is based on the order of ascii codes.
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