Andrew Eross wrote:
> 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.

Your problems are caused by the upgrade. 2.0.3 has a bug. See this 
thread 
http://lists.slony.info/pipermail/slony1-general/2010-April/010596.html


A fix has already been committed to cvs


> 
> 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 <mailto:eross at locatrix.com>
> 
> 
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-- 
Steve Singer
Afilias Canada
Data Services Developer
416-673-1142