Re: Can I backup a course from Mysql and restore to Postgres?

by Thorsten Bartel.  

Hey Walter,

I suspect your Postgres and MySQL installations may be using different character sets (collations) for their databases.
Especially MySQL has a nasty habit of using "UTF8" as its standard collation, which unfortunately supports only a small subset of unicode characters (3 bytes instead of 4). Check the collation of your MySQL database by executing the following SQL queries:

USE db_name;
SELECT @@character_set_database, @@collation_database;

The following problems could result from faulty collations (among others):
- Due to identical field lengths but 3 byte characters in one and 4 byte characters in the other database, entries exported from one database could be too long to import in the other one.
- Certain unicode special characters from the exported database cannot be imported into the other database.

Cheers