Re: upgrading a three year old server

tony wrote:

> Can I change the encoding to UTF-8 easily?

I had to convert as well while upgrading to 8.1.0.

We came from 8.0.3; for some reason all our db's were 'LATIN1' in PG,
and while things worked OK, we wanted to get rid of this too. All the
data in our db's came from web-apps and forms. All the pages that were
used to enter that data were UTF-8, so essentially the data *was*
correct UTF8.
First I went for the dirty hack and tried to fool PG by simply changing
the LATIN1 string in the dump to UTF8; it seems to work but later on
pg_restore chokes on the blobs.
After extensive research I found a solution that worked 100% for me.

On the old server, dump db including blobs etc:
pg_dump -Fc yourdb > yourdb.dump

On our new server (debian), the installation seemed to have run initdb
with -E LATIN1, so I needed to remove my data tree first and the
properly recreate it:

initd -E UTF-8 -D /var/lib/postgresql/8.1/main/data

After that I created the db but with the old LATIN1 encoding:

createdb -E LATIN1 yourdb

Then restore the old dump into it:

pg_restore yourdb yourdb.dump

From this moment on, the data on my webpages looks OK (I looked at some
really foreign stuff my users had filled in, like Arabic and Hebrew (no
pun intended)), but the db is still LATIN1.

Because 8.1 allows you to dump db's with blobs and all to TXT files, you
dump the whole thing to TXT on your new server:

pg_dump -Fp yourdb > yourdb.txt.dump

Then edit the dumpfile manually and change the LATIN1 string to UTF8.
If you are sure your db does not actually contain the string LATIN1, you
could do:

pg_dump -Fp yourdb | sed 's/LATIN1/UTF8/g' > yourdb.txt.dump

Now drop the db and recreate it with the correct encoding:

dropdb yourdb && createdb -E UTF8 yourdb

Now import the dump; this needs to be done with psql because it is txt:

psql yourdb < yourdb.txt.dump

At this time you will have a proper UTF8 db.

FYI, this solution worked for me, and I am pretty sure the reason why it
worked it that our websites were 'UTF8-proof' from the beginning.

If everything is setup correct, you might see really cool strings appear
on user-filled-in forms:

http://www.terena.nl/compendium/2005/basicinfo.php?nrenid=26

:)

Best regards,

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