On Wednesday 02 December 2009 11:33:38 pm Kern Sibbald wrote: > > ( BTW, one way to handle incorrectly encoded filenames and paths might > > be to have a `bytea' field that's generally null to store such mangled > > file names. Personally though I'd favour just rejecting them. ) > > > > > We set SQL_ASCII by default when creating the database via the command > > > recommended in recent versions of PostgreSQL (e.g. 8.1), with: > > > > > > CREATE DATABASE bacula ENCODING 'SQL_ASCII'; > > > > > > However, with PostgreSQL 8.4, the above command is ignored because the > > > default table copied is not template0. > > > > It's a pity that attempting to specify an encoding other than the safe > > one when using a non-template0 database doesn't cause the CREATE > > DATABASE command to fail with an error. > > I didn't actually run it myself, so it is possible that it produced an > error message, but it did apparently create the database but with UTF-8 > encoding. Most of these things are done in script files, so certain > non-fatal errors may be overlooked. > > As far as I can tell, it took the above encoding command, and perhaps > printed an error message but went ahead and created the database with an > encoding that was not correct. If that is indeed the case, then it is in > my opinion, a bad design policy. I would much prefer that either Postgres > accept the command or that it not create the database. This way, either > the database would work as the user expects or there would be no database, > and the problem would be resolved before it creates databases that cannot > be read. It does not CREATE the database. If the users are seeing that happen, then as others have suggested it is a bug. The other option is that they are un-commenting the #ENCODING="ENCODING 'UTF8'" line in the create_postgresql_database.in script to get it to run. The interesting part in that script is the Note: # KES: Note: the CREATE DATABASE, probably should be # CREATE DATABASE ${db_name} $ENCODING TEMPLATE template0 According to the git repository this showed up in July of this year; http://bacula.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=bacula/bacula;a=blob;f=bacula/src/cats/create_postgresql_database.in;hb=6e024d0fe47ea0d9e6d3fbec52c4165caa44967f > > In any case we have corrected the command to include the TEMPLATE, but this > won't help people with older Bacula's. Could they not just get the corrected version of create_postgresql_database.in. It would run on the old versions as well. > > The other point I wanted to emphasize is that the documentation implied > that future versions of Postgres may eliminate the feature of having > SQL_ASCII (i.e. the ability to input arbritrary binary strings). As I > said, that would be a pity -- I suppose we could switch to using LOs or > whatever they are called in Postgres, but that would be rather > inconvenient. Per Tom's previous post: "You misread it. We are not talking about eliminating SQL_ASCII --- as you say, that's useful. What is deprecated is trying to use SQL_ASCII with a non-C locale, which is dangerous, and always has been. If you've been putting non-UTF8 data into a database that could be running under a UTF8-dependent locale, I'm surprised you haven't noticed problems already.' > > Thanks for all the responses, > > Best regards, > > Kern -- Adrian Klaver aklaver@xxxxxxxxxxx -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general