User Guide

To change the database encoding from latin1 to utf-8, follow the steps outlined below.

First, you need to dump the database to a text file using the mysqldump. To dump the database, enter the following command in the command line:

mysqldump -p --default_character-set=latin1 -u root --skip-set-charset aws > awsbackup.sql          

Now, copy the awsbackup.sql file to awsbackup-utf8.sql

Using a text editor change the character sets from "latin1" to "utf-8".

Using Recode (http://recode.progiciels-bpi.ca/), encode all the latin1 characters as UTF-8.

Now, use the mysql client to connect to the server as the MySQL root user and create the 'aws' database with binary UTF-8 collation:

shell> mysql -u root -p 

When you are connected to the server use the following commands to drop your existing [aws] database and create a new database with binary UTF-8 collation:

mysql> DROP DATABASE aws; 
mysql> CREATE DATABASE aws CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;

Finally, import the UTF-8 text file to the new database.

mysql -u root -p --default-character-set=utf8 --max_allowed_packet=64M aws < awsbackup-utf8.sql

Before proceeding update your PostgreSQL database to UTF-8, backup data using SQL dump. Backup your database using the following commands.

pg_dump aws > awsbackup;         

To create a PostgreSQL database with binary UTF-8 collation use the following command:

CREATE DATABASE aws WITH ENCODING 'UNICODE';

Finally, to restore the backup of your database, use the following commands:

pg_dump aws < awsbackup;         

If you carefully followed the steps outlined on this page you should successfully be able to change the character encoding for MySQL and PostreSQL.