What are the risks to use a non-recommended database collation in JIRA 7.4.x with MS SQL 2014?

Question

Hello everyone,

we started with launching the server for installing JIRA 7.4 for our team. Because our company have some restrictions, we need to use a MS SQL 2014 server that is shared with other team databases. In fact of that we are restricted to use some predefined database collations.

The database service teams provides only the following database collations for MS SQL Server:

* Latin1_General_CI_AS
* Latin1_General_CS_AS

* SQL_Latin1_General_CP850_CI_AS

I searched a lot in the internet and only found the answers from Atlassian that the both collations 'SQL_Latin1_General_CP437_CI_AI' or 'Latin1_General_CI_AI' are supported for JIRA.

What is the risk if we use one of the three listed collations instead of the supported ones by JIRA? Are there any big issues we can expect in the future?

Thanks in advance for your replies

Natalie

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

You could run into problems with users being unable to log in, or text being invisible, and dropped from xml backups.

In the future, you may well not be able to upgrade at all.