Question

I have a fixture (json) which loads in development environment but fails to do so in server environment. The error says: “DatabaseError: value too long for type character varying(50)“

My development environment is Windows & Postgres 8.4. The server runs Debian and Postgres 8.3. Database encoding is UTF8 in both systems.

It is as if unicode markers in the fixture count as chars on the server and they cause some strings to exceed their field’s max length. However that does not happen in the dev environment..

Answer 1

Well, what makes the difference is the encoding of the template databases. On the production server they had ascii encoding while on the dev box it is utf-8.

By default postgres creates a database using the template1. My understanding is that if its encoding is not utf-8, then the database you create will have this issue, even though you create it with utf-8 encoding.

Therefore I dropped it and recreated it with its encoding set to UTF8. The snippet below does it (taken from here):

psql -U postgres 

UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = TRUE where datname = 'template0';
\c template0
UPDATE pg_database SET datistemplate = FALSE where datname = 'template1';
drop database template1;
create database template1 with template = template0 encoding = 'UNICODE';
UPDATE pg_database SET datistemplate = TRUE where datname = 'template1';
\c template1
UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = FALSE where datname = 'template0';

Now the fixture loads smoothly.