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What are the commands to enable and disable case sensitivity by default for an entire database on a MySQL server? I'm aware of the COLLATE statement, but it seems it's necessary to place this in every SQL statement that's run. Is there an option to set this globally?

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You can set collation at both the database creation and table creation level as a part of the CREATE TABLE statement.

To set the collation for the entire database, you can use:

CREATE DATABASE test_database CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_cs;

You can also change the collation on an existing database via ALTER DATABASE. (For more information see the MySQL Database Character Set and Collation manual entry.)

If however, only a single table needs to be treated as case sensitive, you could simply use:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS test_table;
CREATE TABLE test_table (
  test_id bigint unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
  ...

  PRIMARY KEY test_id (test_id),
  ...
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_cs;

(Case insensitive being "utf8_general_ci".)

Finally, the main MySQL Character Set Support manual section is probably worth a quick peruse. (It lists the character sets and collations supported by MySQL, tells you how to set the character set/collation at the server level, etc.)