case - non case sensitive search query?

[nelsons]

Am trying to do a search on words within a blob. In this case, a list of specialties in a paragraph.

So far:

$query = "SELECT FirstName, LastName, Specialties, MemID FROM $tablename WHERE Specialties LIKE '%$ss%' and MemState = '$ms' ORDER BY FirstName";

Which seems to work fine, however it is case sensitive. Or appears to be so.

Engineer versus engineer - one returns results, the other does not. The query seems to favor the exact case of the search word.

Does anyone know of a way to make the searches non case sensitive?

[ereptur]

blobs are always case-sensitive. text types are identical to blobs except that they are not case-sensitive.