Mapping of Identifiers to File Names that your statements always refer to your database and table names with the correct lettercase on Windows. If you transfer your statements to Unix, where lettercase is significant, they do not work if the lettercase is incorrect. Exception : If you are using  InnoDB  tables and you are trying to avoid these data transfer problems, you should use  lower_case_table_names=1  on all platforms to force names to be converted to lowercase. Object names may be considered duplicates if their uppercase forms are equal according to a binary collation. That is true for names of cursors, conditions, procedures, functions, savepoints, stored routine parameters, stored program local variables, and plugins. It is not true for names of columns, constraints, databases, partitions, statements prepared with  PREPARE , tables, triggers, users, and user-defined variables. File system case sensitivity can affect searches in string columns of  INFORMATION_SCHEMA  tables. For more information, see Section 10.8.7, “Using Collation in INFORMATION_SCHEMA Searches” . There is a correspondence between database and table identifiers and names in the file system. For the basic structure, MySQL represents each database as a directory in the data directory, and depending upon the storage engine, each table may be represented by one or more files in the appropriate database directory. For the data and index files, the exact representation on disk is storage engine specific. These files may be stored in the database directory, or the information may be stored in a separate file.  InnoDB  data is stored in the InnoDB data files. If you are using tablespaces with  InnoDB , then the specific tablespace files you create are used instead. Any character is legal in database or table identifiers except ASCII NUL ( X’00’ ). MySQL encodes any characters that are problematic in the corresponding file system objects when it creates database directories or table files: 1875 •Basic Latin letters ( a..zA..Z ), digits ( 0..9 ) and underscore ( _ ) are encoded as is. Consequently, their case sensitivity directly depends on file system features. •All other national letters from alphabets that have uppercase/lowercase mapping are encoded as shown in the following table. Values in the Code Range column are UCS-2 values. 9.2.4 Mapping of Identifiers to File Names Code Range Pattern Number Used Unused Blocks 00C0..017F [@][0..4][g..z] 5*20= 100 97 3 Latin-1 Supplement + Latin Extended- A 0370..03FF [@][5..9][g..z] 5*20= 100 88 12 Greek and Coptic 0400..052F [@][g..z][0..6] 20*7= 140 137 3 Cyrillic + Cyrillic Supplement 0530..058F [@][g..z][7..8] 20*2= 40 38 2 Armenian 2160..217F [@][g..z][9] 20*1= 20 16 4 Number Forms 0180..02AF [@][g..z][a..k] 20*11=220 203 17 Latin Extended- B + IPA Extensions