Question

I can’t get a query to be case-insensitive using MySQL and Drupal 7. Here’s my module code:

$results = db_select('people_table', 'p')->fields('p');
if (array_key_exists('department', $_GET)) {
    $results->condition('Department', '%' . db_like($_GET['department']) . '%', 'LIKE');
}
return $results->orderBy('Name', 'ASC')->execute();

With ?department=Chemistry in the URL, I get three results. With ?department=chemistry in the URL, I get no results. When I try $results->condition('UPPER(Department)'..., I get this error:

PDOException: SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column ‘UPPERDepartment’ in ‘where clause’: SELECT p.* FROM {people_table} p WHERE (UPPERDepartment LIKE :db_condition_placeholder_0 ESCAPE ‘\\’) ORDER BY Name ASC;

So it looks like it eats my parentheses. How can I do a case-insensitive LIKE?

Edit: the collation on the Department column as well as on the whole table is utf8_bin. This answer says “The only special one is utf8_bin which is for comparing characters in binary format.” I don’t know why this collation was chosen, since all the data in the table is English text. I might just change the collation to utf8_general_ci.

Answer 1

what is collation of Department field?, it should be with prefix *_ci (case insensitive) for ex utf8_unicode_ci