Hi Jonas, Thanks for the proposal! I added some comments in the docs, but I'd like to emphasize my biggest concern here as well.
When we talk about upper/lower-casing we have to know the locale, in which that operation is to be performed. Using a specific locale, we have to declare a particular natural language context. Now, the question is how do we deal with identifiers that can Unicode characters from different languages? Tip of the "iceberg" :) : https://github.com/apache/iceberg/issues/9276 Thanks, Dmitri. On Fri, Oct 17, 2025 at 7:26 PM Honah J. <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I would like to start a discussion around supporting an option to make > catalog case insensitive. > > In multi-engine data lake environments, different engines (Spark, Trino, > Flink, etc.) apply different casing and normalization rules when reading or > writing identifiers. As a result, the same logical table may be interpreted > differently across engines. For example, Polaris currently preserves > identifier casing, so a table created by Spark with mixed-case names may > not be discoverable from Trino, which lowercases identifiers. This > inconsistency burdens users and undermines script portability. > > I drafted a proposal[1] with more details and a solution: introducing an > immutable catalog property to store and look up namespaces, tables, and > other objects case‑insensitively > > I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions! > > [1] > > https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-3ywobpRvgdHPhe0J4w7l6t4NX79iqaeFOohCXG_12U/edit?usp=sharing > < > https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-3ywobpRvgdHPhe0J4w7l6t4NX79iqaeFOohCXG_12U/edit?usp=sharing > > > > Best regards, > Jonas >
