Thanks for your response Robert. Unfortunately I don't think that will work (unless I'm misunderstanding something). I can't export using a client encoding of WIN1250 because I have true UNICODE chars which can't be represented with it (I've tried and I get the error below). Therefore, I have a sql dump with UNICODE chars and setting the client encoding to WIN1250 when I run the sql dump script would toast the characters. Additionally, here's what I get when I run your test below (my server encoding is UTF-8): ltefull=# create table x (r varchar(255) unique); NOTICE: CREATE TABLE / UNIQUE will create implicit index "x_r_key" for table "x" CREATE TABLE ltefull=# ltefull=# set client_encoding=WIN1250; SET ltefull=# insert into x (r) values ('Daniel Brühl'); INSERT 0 1 ltefull=# ltefull=# insert into x (r) values ('Daniel Bruehl'); ERROR: duplicate key value violates unique constraint "x_r_key" Meetesh Robert Treat wrote: On Wednesday 12 March 2008 09:37, Meetesh Karia wrote:One quick addition to this: The column I'm creating this unique index on is a varchar(255) and the command I was running was: create unique index foo_name on foo (name); If I use the following, it now works: create unique index foo_name on foo (cast(name as bytea)); Thoughts? Meetesh Meetesh Karia wrote:Hi all, I'm trying to migrate from 8.0.14 on Windows (Vista Home Premium) to 8.3.0 and I've been trying to solve what appears to be an encoding problem. My old db was in the UNICODE encoding. I know that this isn't supported on 8.0.x, but it was a restore of a db from a Linux environment and postgres didn't appear to have any problems with it. My 8.3 server and client encodings are UTF8 and I used pg_dumpall (I tried the 8.0 and 8.3 versions) to dump the db. However, when I tried to restore the db, I got an error during index creation which wouldn't let me create a unique index on a column that had all unique values (it had the index in 8.0 and a group by having query with no indexes on the table confirms uniqueness). The thing that this column does have however is values like: 'Bruehl' 'Brühl' I created a blank table with the unique index on it and inserted rows one at a time until I confirmed that it was the above values that were causing a problem. Running the following query shows the difference in the hex encoded values (I changed my client encoding to WIN1250 to get the below to show up correctly): select name, encode(decode(name, 'escape'), 'hex') from ... name | encode ---------------+---------------------------- Daniel Brühl | 44616e69656c204272c3bc686c Daniel Bruehl | 44616e69656c2042727565686c (2 rows) I've also tried exporting using an encoding of WIN1250 but I get errors like this: pg_dump: Error message from server: ERROR: character 0xc383 of encoding "UNICODE" has no equivalent in "WIN1250" Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions? Why would the index creation fail? Is there a workaround?I'm not convinced your problem isn't solved by proper setting of client_encoding for both input and output: pagila=# create table x (r varchar(255) unique); NOTICE: CREATE TABLE / UNIQUE will create implicit index "x_r_key" for table "x " CREATE TABLE pagila=# set client_encoding=WIN1250; SET pagila=# insert into x (r) values ('Daniel Brühl'); INSERT 0 1 pagila=# insert into x (r) values ('Daniel Bruehl'); INSERT 0 1 pagila=# select * from x; r --------------- Daniel Brühl Daniel Bruehl (2 rows) |