I have a function that returns five characters with mixed case. If I do a query on this string it will return the value regardless of case.
How can I make MySQL string queries case sensitive?
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/case-sensitivity.html
The default character set and collation are latin1 and latin1_swedish_ci, so nonbinary string comparisons are case insensitive by default. This means that if you search with col_name LIKE 'a%', you get all column values that start with A or a. To make this search case sensitive, make sure that one of the operands has a case sensitive or binary collation. For example, if you are comparing a column and a string that both have the latin1 character set, you can use the COLLATE operator to cause either operand to have the latin1_general_cs or latin1_bin collation:
col_name COLLATE latin1_general_cs LIKE 'a%'
col_name LIKE 'a%' COLLATE latin1_general_cs
col_name COLLATE latin1_bin LIKE 'a%'
col_name LIKE 'a%' COLLATE latin1_bin
If you want a column always to be treated in case-sensitive fashion, declare it with a case sensitive or binary collation.