Bug #16450 Restoring of Russian UTF-8 Text Data in MySQL Administrator GUI Is Problematic
Submitted: 12 Jan 2006 13:07 Modified: 26 Jul 2006 14:18
Reporter: Alex Email Updates:
Status: Closed Impact on me:
None 
Category:MySQL Administrator Severity:S1 (Critical)
Version:1.1.6 OS:Windows (Windows XP Professional SP2)
Assigned to: Mike Lischke CPU Architecture:Any
Tags: Backup

[12 Jan 2006 13:07] Alex
Description:
I have been working with MovableType and MySQL to edit my blog (in Russian, UTF-8 encoding - so was the encoding of my database). I accidentally deleted my schema, but there were appropriate backup files (.sql dumps). I tried to restore the schema using this file, but the mechanism processed only a small part of it (gave me a "finished restoring successfully" message after having processed only 350 KB out of a 5 MB file!). I noticed that the processing stopped right before the point of inserting actual text data within the dump file. Maybe there is a problem with restoring Russian UTF-8 texts? I have written over 150 articles, so the restoring the blog ASAP was critical to me, and I think it will be critical also for others. Though I fixed the problem by restoring the file using the "source" command of the MySQL command-line client, this is definitely a bug in the visual MySQL administrator.

How to repeat:
Perform a restore procedure in MySQL administrator from a .sql backup file with Russian UTF-8 content.

Suggested fix:
Maybe UTF-8 encoding symbols of the database contents are treated as special delimiters in .sql dumps by MySQL administrator, so the program should know where the content is and not to mistake it for other symbols.
[12 Jan 2006 15:55] MySQL Verification Team
Can you provide a dump for to test on our side?. If you want to keep it private
you can upload the zip file at ftp://ftp.mysql.com:/pub/mysql/upload
with a name identifying this bug report i.e: bug16450.zip.

Thanks in advance
[12 Jan 2006 15:59] Alex
Thanks I will attach a file soon
[12 Jan 2006 16:30] Alex
File sent to the private FTP location.
Update - the engine cannot fill the mt_entry table, but fills the tables that appear before it in the dump.
[12 Jan 2006 16:54] MySQL Verification Team
Thank you for the bug report and feedback.
[20 Jan 2006 23:58] Alex
After dealing with an issue a little bit I began to doubt whether it's an actual bug in MySQL. Maybe it's a bug of the Windows configuration of MovableType that stores non-Latin characters incorrectly (because on UNIX this issue does not exist and). This results in display of garbled characters in .sql dump files (but if I enter Russian characters to some test table directly from MySQL browser and not from within MovableType, the test table's dump is perfectly readable). So maybe one of these dummy characters is treated as a delimiter or an EOF marker by the visual MySQL Administrator and the processing stops because of this. Anyway I think this error possibility should better be taken into consideration and bypassed (if possible) in the next releases because until MovableType fixes its own bug many databases may be lost.
[21 Jan 2006 0:01] Alex
Also worth notice: if I could restore my file (nonetheless the garbled characters bug) using the appropriate command-line utility, this is anyway an indication of some discrepancy between the visual MySQL Apdministrator and MySQL command-line programs.
[26 Jul 2006 13:14] Mike Lischke
It is important to understand what happens when different encodings are mixed up. To me it sounds like the wrong character set was used. However without an actual dump I cannot do anything, so please provide a dump of your data that fails with MA or close the bug entry if the problem is solved now. Thank you.
[26 Jul 2006 14:18] Alex
I have provided the dump earlier but since the problem has lost its actuality for me now, I prefer to close the entry.