 <p>To quote <a href="http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/case-sensitivity.html" rel="nofollow">the documentation</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>The default character set and collation are latin1 and latin1_swedish_ci, so nonbinary string comparisons are case insensitive by default. This means that if you search with col_name LIKE 'a%', you get all column values that start with A or a. To make this search case sensitive, make sure that one of the operands has a case sensitive or binary collation. For example, if you are comparing a column and a string that both have the latin1 character set, you can use the COLLATE operator to cause either operand to have the latin1_general_cs or latin1_bin collation</p> </blockquote> <p>You can overcome this by explicitly using a case sensitive collation:</p> <pre><code>select * from names where name='Bill' COLLATE latin1_general_cs </code></pre>