Can’t select database

Yes, I know there are a dozen other posts on this subject, but none of them have helped — most aren’t even marked “resolved”.

I’m getting this infamous error message:

Can’t select database

We were able to connect to the database server (which means your username and password is okay) but not able to select the santacruz_com_blog database.

* Are you sure it exists?
* On some systems the name of your database is prefixed with your username, so it would be like username_wordpress. Could that be the problem?

The database absolutely does exist (I can see it listed in the MySQL database manager), and I have it spelled correctly in the wp-config.php file:

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘santacruz_com_blog’);

I note that there’s an option to create ODBC connections in the MySQL manager, but don’t even know what that means.

Any suggestions would be appreciated