MySQL in a Nutshell

Name

BINARY

Synopsis

BINARY string

Use this function to treat strings in their binary state. This function is useful for making SQL statements case-sensitive. Notice that the syntax does not call for parentheses:

SELECT student_id, name_last
FROM students
WHERE BINARY LEFT(UCASE(name_last), 1) <>
   LEFT(name_last, 1);
+------------+-----------+
| student_id | name_last |
+------------+-----------+
|  433302000 | dyer      |
|  434016005 | de Vitto  |
+------------+-----------+

This SQL statement checks for any students whose last name starts with a lowercase letter. To do this, each student’s last name is converted to uppercase letters and then the first letter starting from the left is extracted to compare it to the first letter of the last name without case conversion. The results show one record that is probably a typing error and another (the second one) that is probably correct. Notice that the BINARY keyword is specified before the comparison is made between the strings and is applied to both strings.