Case Sensitive SQL Search

MySQL on default installation uses the case insensitive configuration meaning the data you stored and searched will not be case sensitive.

Let us first check our current server and database's appropariate variables.

SHOW VARIABLES
WHERE variable_name = 'character_set_server'

> latin1

SHOW VARIABLES
WHERE variable_name = 'collation_database'

> latin1_swedish_ci

Since we are using latin based language settings, the cases are different unlike some languages that don't have cases. And with the database collation set to latin_swedish_ci the string search will be case insensitive (ci).

For this illustration, I have created a table "country" with single column "country_name" and inserted 3 rows.

CREATE TABLE country (
     country_name varchar(32) NOT NULL
);
INSERT INTO country
VALUES ('US'), ('UK'), ('ukraine')
; 
COMMIT;