How to Configure MySQL to be Case Sensitive

I've come here looking to modify the collation only for a specific column for it to be case-sensitive and not for the entire table or the database. Hope it helps someone looking just for this.

This query could be tried:

ALTER TABLE table_name MODIFY column_name column_datatype COLLATE utf8_bin;

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.)