Ты неправ.Хотя LIKE работает без учёта регистра
becoolWarning
The REGEXP and RLIKE operators work in byte-wise fashion, so they are not multi-byte safe and may produce unexpected results with multi-byte character sets. In addition, these operators compare characters by their byte values and accented characters may not compare as equal even if a given collation treats them as equal.
Хм. Прочитал несколько раз.На cp1251 rlike регистр не учитывает, а вот на utf8_general_ci вроде нет.

mysql> SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM `collation_test` LIKE 'txt';
+-------+--------------+-------------------+
| Field | Type | Collation |
+-------+--------------+-------------------+
| txt | varchar(255) | cp1251_general_ci |
Запросы
mysql> SELECT * FROM `collation_test` WHERE txt RLIKE '^asdf';
mysql> SELECT * FROM `collation_test` WHERE txt LIKE 'asdf';
Возвращают
+------+
| txt |
+------+
| aSdf |
| aSdF |
| ASDF |
| aSdF |
+------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM `collation_test` LIKE 'txt';
+-------+--------------+-------------------+
| Field | Type | Collation |
+-------+--------------+-------------------+
| txt | varchar(255) | cp1251_general_cs |
+-------+--------------+-------------------+
Возвращают Empty set (0.00 sec)
Точно так=же если кодировка в UTF.
mysql> SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM `collation_test` LIKE 'txt';
+-------+--------------+-----------+
| Field | Type | Collation |
+-------+--------------+-----------+
| txt | varchar(255) | utf8_bin |
+-------+--------------+-----------+
Возвращает нулевой результат.
Поиск регистрозависимый
если utf8_general_ci
то регистронезависимый.
скомкано написалМожно трактовать по всякому.

+-------+--------------+-------------------+
| Field | Type | Collation |
+-------+--------------+-------------------+
| txt | varchar(255) | cp1251_general_ci |
mysql> SELECT * FROM `collation_test` WHERE txt RLIKE '^asdf';
mysql> SELECT * FROM `collation_test` WHERE txt LIKE 'asdf';
Возвращают
+------+
| txt |
+------+
| aSdf |
| aSdF |
| ASDF |
| aSdF |
+------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)
или я путаюсь в понятиях, имею ввиду(например cp1251_general_ci) работает правильно - без учёта регистра