Lowercase Table Names
A student posed the question about why table names are case sensitive. That’s because case sensitive table names are the default installation, as qualified in the MySQL documentation. You can verify that with the following query:
SELECT CASE WHEN @@lower_case_table_names = 1 THEN 'Case insensitive tables' ELSE 'Case sensitive tables.' END AS "Table Name Status"; |
The default value returned on Linux is:
+------------------------+ | Table Name Status | +------------------------+ | Case sensitive tables. | +------------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) |
The default value for the lower_case_table_names value on the Windows OS is 1 not 0 because you can inadvertently create a lowercase and case sensitive table when you write an INSERT statement and use a lowercase table name. I’ve provided that detail in a reply comment to this blog post.
You can change the default by adding the following parameter in the my.cnf file on Linux or the my.ini file on Windows:
# Make all tables case insensitive. lower_case_table_names=1 |
This lets you enter tables in upper or mixed case, and stores them in the data catalog as lowercase table names.
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