Question

I have MySQL database version 5.1.36, that came with WAMP installation. I used it for development purposes on Windows XP SP3, and it has some data in it, which is cyrillic, and the collation for all of those tables/columns is set to utf8_general_ci.

Now the time has come to move this database to pseudo-production environment, which is on Debian Lenny. Version of MySQL here is 5.0.51a.

I tried the following:

1. I exported the databse with data from phpmyadmin on Windows and saved the .sql file to be in UTF8.
2. Then, I transferred it through WinSCP (both with default and binary transfer settings) to Linux machine.
3. I created the database through command line: mysqladmin -u root -p create nbs

4. Finally, I tried to create tables and fill the data:

   mysql -u root -p --default-character-set=utf8 nbs < NBS_utf8_1.sql

However, this is where I’m getting the error, like:

ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 1: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `history_members` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_’ at line 1

Something is messed up with encoding, I suppose… but don’t know how and where. I think I read in the similar question on SO that binary mode for text transfer will only change the line breaks CRLF to LF (don’t know if this is correct…). What am I missing here?

Thanks.

Answer 1

For this particular case, the problem was solved with the following modifications:

1) I set initial collation while creating the target database to utf8_general_ci,
2) I transferred the file with text mode through WinSCP,
3) I added SET NAMES 'utf8' COLLATE 'utf8_general_ci'; to the top of sql dump.