Database Collation Change to CI versus UTF-8

Client has a problem running Confluence 5.7.x with MySQL as the database backend, but has found that a primary page visited by CIO/CTO takes approximately 18 seconds to load as the MySQL database can not handle the functional indexes for lowercase queries.

This is related to CONFDEV-35393 and is a problem with performance. Our client has performed the workaround in Creating a lowercase page title index and these steps had to be altered slightly (will add as aa comment hereto) to make the changes work.

However, mixed-case pages are not able to be found using the search (as we have documented in the article). Our client has found that altering the database collation provides better performance overall with the instance than the UTF-8 collation.

They would like to know if there are any risks to altering the database collation as they are not seeing issues with the foreign character display or other functions in the instance, and would like to know for certain if there are any additional risks to changing their collation to be case-insensitive, in other words, will any additional functionality be lost by changing the DB (MySQL) collation to be case insensitive (ci)?