Re: Strange UTF8 issue with pg_dump/pg_restore

-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin Krajmalnik [mailto:kraj@illumen.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2006 10:31 PM
To: Jim Nasby
Subject: RE: [ADMIN] Strange UTF8 issue with pg_dump/pg_restore

I had corrupt rows inserted on 8.1.4/Windows.  I had truncated the table, and it startd collecting data again.

I have since moved to 8.1.4/FreeBSD.  I have been running the data for 2 days now, so the odds of having a corrupt record is pretty good if the problem exists.  I will wait a few more days and will pg_dump the table which had the problems and attempt to restor it on a dev server to see if I see a problem.

 

Is iconv a utility that comes woth PG?  How can I run the data through it (I am doing pg_dump in custom format).

 

---

From: Jim Nasby [mailto:jnasby@pervasive.com]
Sent: Tue 8/8/2006 10:48 AM
To: Benjamin Krajmalnik
Cc: pgsql admin
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Strange UTF8 issue with pg_dump/pg_restore

On Aug 7, 2006, at 9:08 PM, Benjamin Krajmalnik wrote:
> I have a database whose records are inserted via ODBC.
> I turned on logging, and the client is explicitly setting the 
> client encoding to UTF.
>
> Rows are inserted into the tables.  When I do a pg_dump, I do not 
> get any errors.  When I try tor restore, I am getting an error 
> regarding an invalid UTF-8 character sequence.
> Of course, this renders compressed backups useless, since I have no 
> way of manually fixing the file.  The process of fixing the file 
> is, of course, painful.
>
> Is this a known issue?  I am running PG 8.1.4.  The problem 
> happened on PG Windows.
> Tomorrow I will try to see if the problem exists in the FreeBSD 
> compile.  If I get it to reproduce, I will be able to send some 
> data dumps, but will need to know who to send it to.

Are the dumps from an older version? There's a known issue that older 
versions weren't doing proper checking, in which case you can have 
invalid UTF8 characters. The fix is to run the dump through iconv.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461