Tom, et. al., pg_dump was not the issue as you surmised. Bad data, fixed in some cases in the original db and in some cases with a sed script. I tried a pg 8.1 pg_dump and that in fact helped diagnose the (human) error. Thanks once again for the help. gsw -----Original Message----- From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Thu 2/16/2006 10:19 PM To: Gregory S. Williamson Cc: pgsql-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Something like pg_dump for 7.4 "Gregory S. Williamson" <gsw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > I am trying to migrate a modest sized database (the unload file is just under a gigabyte) which is moderately complex, using schemas and the like from 7.4 to 8.1 > Alas, pg_dump appears to incompatable with my needs as it keeps introducing invalid UTF-8 characters. It's quite unlikely that pg_dump is at fault. Rather the data you are dumping is probably wrong. There were some errors in pre-8.1 versions that caused them to accept byte sequences that are not actually legal UTF8 strings. 8.1 has tightened up that code and so will reject data that 7.4 thought was legal. Check the archives for some previous discussions about reasonable ways to fix bad data --- I seem to recall iconv being mentioned as one possible filter for your dump file. > Is there any way to do this ? I can't edit the resulting dump file by hand -- it's huge. And pg_dump on 7.4 does not know how to a table inside a schema -- it seems to be all or nothing. You could use the 8.1 pg_dump against the 7.4 server if you need more flexibility. regards, tom lane !DSPAM:43f56b0a203851333710190!