Impact of Collation settings in JIRA

[siddharth]

We are in the process of upgrading JIRA from 6.4.7 to 7.13. Our current SQL collation setting is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS but to upgrade to 7.13 the supported collation settings is Latin1_CI_AI . What is the impact if I keep the collation settings to Latin1_CI_AS instead of Latin1_CI_AI.

[Fazila Ashraf]

Hi @siddharth

The severity of using an unsupported collation varies from database-to-database and also collation-to-collation. Best case JIRA will run all OK and have no problems, worse case JIRA will fail when persisting data to the database, or be able to persist some data and not others, leading to integrity problems. Additionally data may be saved to the database, however, JIRA expects the collation to sort it differently and then works incorrectly as the data is returned in the wrong order (JIRA Software ranking, for example). We do not test JIRA using unsupported collations and as a result of this, it's possible to end up in critical situations where the only fix is to either face data loss or rollback to before the problems occur, after correcting the collation.

Refer to https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/health-check-database-collation-790955315.html 

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