I have an open bug in CentralNotice [1] where I have a search function by
name for old content. Naively this happens as a LIKE query on the table's
name column. Though this works, it fails at being case insensitive because
the table, like most(all?) other tables on the WMF cluster, has by default
binary charset/collation.
Given that I want to support case insensitive searching; does anyone have
any thoughts or examples on how to go about doing it in a binary table?
The only solution I can think of would be to change the collation/charset
of the table in question to utf8. Would that be a bad idea? I'm led to
understand the binary default came about because older versions of MySQL
did not support the full multilingual plane. But this might no longer be an
issue with MariaDB 5.6?
[1]
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53751
~Matt Walker
Wikimedia Foundation
Fundraising Technology Team