As you might know when using MySQL on a case-sensitive OS (like Linux) you must reference your table names in a case sensitive manner. So if you have a table called products the following sample query will NOT work:
SELECT productId
FROM Products
It won’t work because MySQL stores the table information in directories on the file system, therefore these directories are case sensitive. So your query must be as follows (note the lower case products):
SELECT productId
FROM products
That’s all good and well, but did you know that using table aliases are also case sensitive? I found this out the other day when debugging an issue with some existing code and confirmed on the MySQL site that “By default, table aliases are case sensitive on Unix, but not so on Windows or Mac OSX”.
So the following query will fail because the alias used in the WHERE clause is different from the one used in the FROM definition:
SELECT productId
FROM products AS p
WHERE P.productId > 1000
Although database and table names are not case sensitive on some platforms, you should not refer to a given database or table using different cases within the same statement. The following statement would not work because it refers to a table both as my_table and as MY_TABLE:
mysql> SELECT * FROM my_table WHERE MY_TABLE.col=1;
If your interested you can read more on MySQL identifier case sensitivity here.