Hi! Within a UTF-8 encoded database, I have a table: CREATE TABLE pics (id serial not null unique, img bytea); The table is originally initialized with a set of IDs. Then I'm using perl-script to insert apropriate images by means of UPDATEing rows: --------------within my script called 'job'------------------- my $db = DBI->connect('DBI:Pg:dbname=mydb') or die "DBI"; my $z = $db->prepare("UPDATE pics set img=? where id=?") or die "PREPARE"; my $rc = $z->execute($content, $FILEID) or die "EXEC"; --------------------- But the result is somewhat unexpected: ---------------console output---------------------- DBD::Pg::st execute failed: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x89 EXEC at ./job line 22, <> chunk 1. --------------------------------- How come the bytearea is *interpreted* as having encoding? Or to put it the other way around: What column datatype should I use for an opoque binary value? (my postgres is 8.1.4) -- -R