Re: Can't dump and restore

Tom,
As far as I can tell the source and destination dbs are SQL_ASCII, but I
have to admit I'm not sure how to find out. When I dump just the schema for
the cluster, I get the following create database statements in the dump:

CREATE DATABASE neo WITH TEMPLATE = template0 OWNER = postgres ENCODING =
'SQL_ASCII';

So it looks to me like it's using 'SQL_ASCII'.

The dump I got from 7.? when I upgraded restored into 8.1 just fine. This
is a dump from the 8.1. I've done some tests this morning where I just dump
a table, create a temp database and try to restore the table into it. I've
tried creating the db with different encodings and tried changing the line
"SET client_encoding = 'SQL_ASCII';" in the dump to "SET client_encoding =
'UNICODE';", and they have the same results.

So, long and short, I think that everything should be SQL_ASCII, but even
when it is, I get the error.

Thanks,
Peter Darley

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us]
Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2005 1:22 PM
To: Peter Darley
Cc: Pgsql-Admin
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Can't dump and restore

"Peter Darley" <pdarley(at)kinesis-cem(dot)com> writes:
> I'm having some trouble restoring data that was dumped from my database.
> When I dump out a table (pg_dump -d neo -t question > question.tbl) and
try
> to restore it (psql -d temp -f question.tbl) I get errors on certain rows:
> "psql:question.tbl:15861: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding
> "UNICODE": 0xe96520". This happens when I use SQL_ASCII or UNICODE as the
> encoding. I didn't try any other encodings.

Er, what is the encoding of the source database, exactly? Is it the
same as the encoding of the destination database?

SQL_ASCII disables all encoding checks, so it's entirely plausible that
you would have byte sequences that are not legal Unicode in a SQL_ASCII
database. If so, there's not much to do except manually clean up the
bogus data.

Also, if you're trying to restore into PG 8.1 from an older version,
we've fixed some mistakes in the Unicode encoding checker, so there
actually are differences in what the code will accept :-(

regards, tom lane