Open Stack

Thanks mriedem for answering my previous question, and also pointing
out the related previous spec around just forcing all metadata to be
lowercase:

(Spec: approved in Newton) https://review.openstack.org/#/c/311529/
(Online migration: not merged, abandoned)
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/329737/

There are other code patches, but the above is representative. What I
had read was the original bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/1538011

The tl;dr is that the default collation used by MySQL results in a bug
when creating 2 metadata keys which differ only in case. The proposal
was obviously to simply make all metadata keys lower case. However, as
melwitt pointed out in the bug at the time that's a potentially user
hostile change. After some lost IRC discussion it seems that folks
believed at the time that to fix this properly would seriously
compromise the performance of these queries. The agreed way forward
was to allow existing keys to keep their case, but force new keys to
be lower case (so I wonder how the above online migration came
about?).

Anyway, as Rajesh's patch shows, it's actually very easy just to fix
the MySQL misconfiguration:

https://review.openstack.org/#/c/504885/

So my question is, given that the previous series remains potentially
user hostile, the fix isn't as complex as previously believed, and it
doesn't involve a performance penalty, are there any other reasons why
we might want to resurrect it rather than just go with Rajesh's patch?
Or should we ask Rajesh to expand his patch into a series covering
other metadata?

Matt
-- 
Matthew Booth
Red Hat OpenStack Engineer, Compute DFG

Phone: +442070094448 (UK)