Heroku, cant push my db

Question

I am trying to push my database to heroku, and get this error:

Taps Server Error: PGError: ERROR:  invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x89

I am using mysql in my local db, and i have coding utf8 in application.rb. I have try to push with

heroku db:push

or with

heroku db:push mysql2://root:pasword@127.0.0.1/damp?encoding=utf8

What can i do to fix this?

Answer 1

Somewhere in your database there is a character that needs to be encoded in UTF-8, which isn't currently. I have had this bug in the past and the only solution is to find it out and change it. Painful if you have a large database.

Answer 2

In a comment you mention that you have binary images in your database. The error you're seeing:

Taps Server Error: PGError: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x89

is coming from some sort of text column, either varchar or text . In MySQL you want one of the BLOB types , in PostgreSQL you want a BYTEA column , and in with ActiveRecord you want the binary column type . Your table definition should look something like this:

create_table :your_table do |t|
    #...
    t.binary :image_column_name
    #...
end