To: "Dario V. Fassi" <software@sistemat.com.ar>
Cc: pgsql-jdbc@postgresql.org, pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Migrate postgres databases from SQL_ASCII to UNICODE encoding 
In-reply-to: <40F98613.1060405@sistemat.com.ar> 
References: <40F98613.1060405@sistemat.com.ar>
Comments: In-reply-to "Dario V. Fassi" <software@sistemat.com.ar>
	message dated "Sat, 17 Jul 2004 17:03:31 -0300"
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2004 17:18:16 -0400
Message-ID: <16994.1090099096@sss.pgh.pa.us>
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

"Dario V. Fassi" <software@sistemat.com.ar> writes:
> A simple question, we need to migrate many (>20) postgres databases from 
> SQL_ASCII encoding to UNICODE encoding, over a 7.3.6 server.

SQL_ASCII is not an encoding (it's more like the absence of knowledge
about an encoding).  What is the data actually stored as?

> With  Dump/Restore , we get an error (Invalid Unicode) in any field that 
> has a 8 bits character coming from the SQL_ASCII , even setting the 
> client_encoding to WIN, ISO-8859-1,  and others encodings.

It might work to just UPDATE pg_database to set datencoding to the
correct value reflecting what you have actually stored.  You might then
need to REINDEX any indexes on textual columns, but I don't think
anything else would go wrong.

If you have a mishmash of different encodings in a single database, then
of course there is no simple solution; you are in for some pain while
you try to fix the data.

			regards, tom lane