Escaping “Lesson Learned” dealing with MySQL Databases & Case Sensitivity

Escaping “Lesson Learned” dealing with MySQL Databases & Case Sensitivity

Do you ever need to transfer databases between servers? Different OSes?

Two common ways of data migration:
1. Create mysqldump and load it.
2. File transfer using SCP.

Case Sensitivity and Issue:
Yes, that can create big issues when you have to deal with systems having different case sensitivity.
E.g. on linux you can create directories with names “Kedar” or “kedar” which is not possible on windows!
It will be harmful when file-system itself restricting the names to lower case.
MySQL has a variable for that: lower_case_file_system.

Documentation says: This variable describes the case sensitivity of file names on the file system where the data directory is located. OFF means file names are case sensitive, ON means they are not case sensitive. This variable is read only because it reflects a file system attribute and setting it would have no effect on the file system.

Try loading data having different values for lower_case_file_system and you will get it!

How MySQL tries to solves this problem:
It asks user to handle the issue by changing system variable lower_case_table_names accordingly.
Check the options available:
0 : Table names are stored as specified and comparisons are case sensitive.
1 : Table names are stored in lowercase on disk and comparisons are not case sensitive.
2 : Table names are stored as given but compared in lowercase.

So where do I see the problem?
Here control is given to user with the variable lower_case_table_names and ignoring which can definitely lead to issues. These issues can be avoided by putting restrictions.
Also queries working on MAC / Windows may not work well on Linux / Other Flavours; cause problems on application side.

Documentation Says: You should not set this variable to 0 if you are running MySQL on a system that has case-insensitive file names (such as Windows or Mac OS X). If you set this variable to 0 on such a system and access MyISAM tablenames using different lettercases, index corruption may result.

Now, I recently read the change: PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA is renamed to lowercase in MySQL 5.5 to answer a bug [http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=57609] pointed by Marc Alff’s post [http://marcalff.blogspot.com/].

In one line I wish: lower_case_table_names, RIP!
I wish MySQL does the same for all tables in order to avoid case sensitivity problems :).