MySQL - Why are COLLATION rules ignored by LIKE operator for German ß character

Question

I\'m running the following select statements on MySQL 5.0.88 with utf8 charset and utf8_unicode_ci collation:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE surname = \'abcß\';

         


        

Answer 1

Per the SQL standard, LIKE performs matching on a per-character basis, thus it can produce results different from the = comparison operator:

mysql> SELECT 'ä' LIKE 'ae' COLLATE latin1_german2_ci;
+-----------------------------------------+
| 'ä' LIKE 'ae' COLLATE latin1_german2_ci |
+-----------------------------------------+
|                                       0 |
+-----------------------------------------+
mysql> SELECT 'ä' = 'ae' COLLATE latin1_german2_ci;
+--------------------------------------+
| 'ä' = 'ae' COLLATE latin1_german2_ci |
+--------------------------------------+
|                                    1 |
+--------------------------------------+

Source: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-comparison-functions.html#operator_like