Hi folks,

My company (and I) run Slony for 4 of our production databases, and have
been using it for years.

All 3 of our database servers are consistently running Postgres 8.3.10 on
Ubuntu, all databases created with  ENCODING = 'UTF8'.

I recently attempted to upgrade from 2.0.2 to 2.0.3, which went (seemingly)
quite smoothly, the upgrade caused itself went fine, following the standard
instructions.

However, afterwards our replication completely broke, and I started seeing
lots of UTF8 encoding errors reported in the slony log files for 2 of our
databases that had been previously replicating just fine.

Lots of these messages: "ERROR:  invalid byte sequence for *encoding*
 "UTF8":"

I've seen some posts out there in the world with the same problem, probably
from a different cause. e.g., this guy:
http://old.nabble.com/encoding-problems-td28383260.html

Same thing happened to me, and it was not a Postgres versioning issue, this
started occurring only after I upgraded to 2.0.3.

I eventually wrote a tool to manually traverse the entire database in
question and select/update every row after running it through iconv to be
sure there was no encoding issues. I'll open source the tool later, it was a
handy thing to make anyways.

After thatI tried dropping replication and starting from scratch with the
refreshed data, still resulted in the same error.

Anyways, how I've ended up fixing it is I've concluded the problem only
occurs with Slony 2.0.3 ... I have now re-installed 2.0.2 and re-created all
the replication from scratch...and poof no more UTF8 encoding errors.

Sorry, I wish I had the log files, but they got wiped out. I just wanted to
ask if this was a known issue? If not, I will endeavour to go re-create the
bug again and get the logs this time.

PS
Just a side note -- anecdotally -- separately I saw some other errors in the
log files not related to UTF8 encoding, just a general INSERT error because
it looked like Slony was trying to run an SQL query either with a missing
double-quote or with-out properly escaping the string first --- but, sorry,
again, someone deleted our logs, so I'll try to dig that out again too.

Cheers!

Andrew Eross
CTO
Locatrix Communications
+61.405.761.614
eross at locatrix.com
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