Case Insensitive Search/Sort by Keyword field

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

We have a use case to support case insensitive sort on certain fields of keyword type. It seems the general practice is to use normalizer on keyword fields. However, a coworker is concerned that, per ElasticSearch online documentation, normalized is a beta feature and subject to change, and so should be avoided.

My questions are:

  1. Will support for normalizer leave the beta status and become a GA feature in a near future release?
  2. If normalizer is not used, what's the alternative to support case-insensitive search/sort on a keyword field?
2

I believe this feature is pretty much stable. @jpountz could share his thoughts though.

3

We haven't decided yet. We will likely keep a way to normalize keywords, only the way to do it may change and we'll do our best to make the transition easy.

The alternative is to lowercase the keyword on client-side before putting it into the _source. Or potentially automate it with an ingest processor.