Managing & Using MySQL, 2nd Edition

Basic Syntax

SQL is a kind of controlled English language consisting of verb phrases. Each of these verb phrases begins with an SQL command followed by other SQL keywords, literals, identfiers, or punctuation. Keywords are never case sensitive. Identifiers for database names and table names are case sensitive when the underlying filesystem is case sensitive (this includes all Unix except Mac OS X) and case insensitive when the underlying filesystem is case insensitive (this includes Mac OS X and Windows). You should, however, avoid referring to the same database or table name in a single SQL statement using different cases—even if the underlying operating system is case insensitive. For example, the following SQL is troublesome:

SELECT TBL.COL FROM tbl;

Table aliases are case sensitive, but column aliases are case insensitive.

If all this case sensitivity nonsense is annoying, you can force MySQL to convert all table names to lowercase by starting mysqld with the argument -O lower_case_table_names=1.