dbremote on windows + linux (Character encoding problem)

[Former Member]

Hello,

we use SQL Anywhere 10.0.1.4103.

The consolidate server is running under windows and a most of the remote sites are running windows too. We have recently added a few linux remotes, but there we see a replication problem with some characters.

When a windows remote enter text in the database, sometimes the replication fails on the linux systems with this message:

I. 2013-09-03 09:03:00. INSERT INTO DBA.CardEntries(CardEntries,ClientCard,CreationDate,Amount,
                              REMOTENAME,Salesperson,EntryProcessed,BatchID)
                        VALUES ('O000CB','J001UW','12:26:15.446918 2013/08/30',169,'SiteTest1','Sil Sch.r',0,NULL)
E. 2013-09-03 09:03:00. SQL-Anweisung fehlgeschlagen: (-131) Syntaxfehler bei 'Sil Sch.,0,NULL)' in Zeile 3
E. 2013-09-03 09:03:00. Wird übersprungen:
E. 2013-09-03 09:03:00. INSERT INTO DBA.CardEntries(CardEntries,ClientCard,CreationDate,Amount,
                              REMOTENAME,Salesperson,EntryProcessed,BatchID)
                        VALUES ('O000CB','J001UW','12:26:15.446918 2013/08/30',169,'SiteTest1','Sil Sch.r',0,NULL)

The "offending" text is the entry for the sales person which should be "Sil Schär", but apparently it stumbles over the ä character.

All databases have the same encodings:

CHAR Collation: 1251LATIN1

CHAR Encoding: windows-1252

NCHAR Collation: UCA

NCHAR Encoding: UTF-8

The replication is done via Email. In the connection string of dbremote we specify nothing special, only uid,pwd,eng,dbn

I think that the linux dbremote is using a wrong character set when deconding the emails received and then trys to apply the sql operation in a wrong encoding.

Strange is, that messages with the ü character are correctly replicated, but the ä seems to cause problems....

Any ideas how to solve it ?

[VolkerBarth]

"ß" won't be a problem in CH, right?

[Former Member]

Yes, we don't use the "ß", but then, we have éèà and ç for our french customers as well... 🙂

[regdomaratzki]

Try adding "charset=none" in the connection string for dbremote on all nodes. John's comment that dbremote is assuming OS charset when reading a message is correct, and Volker points to very relevant section of the readme file.

[Former Member]

Thanks, this solved the problem. I assume a "CharSet=windows-1252" would also work?

[regdomaratzki]

Assuming that is the proper character set, yes. If all the database use the same encoding, I prefer using charset=none everywhere to tell dbremote never to do characeter set translation, and this solution will work on every computer, regardless of the locale specified on the computer.