James

When you say that a column with collate utf8_bin is not treated as a string, what do you mean? Here is a test case that put together that succeeds. Am I doing something different than you? Are you specifying a character set on your connection string?

[Test] public void VarBinary() { execSQL("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS test"); createTable("CREATE TABLE test (id int, name varchar(200) collate utf8_bin) charset utf8", "InnoDB"); execSQL("INSERT INTO test VALUES (1, 'Test1')");

MySqlCommand cmd = new MySqlCommand("SELECT * FROM test", conn); MySqlDataReader reader = null; try { reader = cmd.ExecuteReader(); Assert.IsTrue(reader.Read()); object o = reader.GetValue(1); Assert.IsTrue(o is string); } catch (Exception ex) { Assert.Fail(ex.Message); } finally { if (reader != null) reader.Close(); } }