Problem when Upgrading to 8.5.0 with Database encoding

[koester_hfg-offenbach_de]

Dear Atlassian Support-Staff,

I'm having a problem when upgrading our local confluence on prem server from 7.13.8 to 8.5.0.

As per your documentation a direct upgrade path is valid:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/upgrading-confluence-4578.html

The updates run's fine but when restarting the confluence server after upgrading to 8.5.0 the databse encoding is invalid.

The encoding needs to be utf8mb4 and charset utf8mb4_bin.

I sticked to your documentation how to deal with this error but the confluence server is not comming up anyways:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/kb/how-to-fix-the-collation-and-character-set-of-a-mysql-database-manually-744326173.html

What can I do?

I did a snapshot prior to upgrading so i revoked my changes, so that people can now continue with their work.

But a new try can be done in no-time.

Can I provide you with any further information or logs / support-information?

Thank you for your help and assiatance.

Kind regards 

Dennis Köster

[Fabio Racobaldo _Herzum_]

Hi @koester_hfg-offenbach_de ,

my suggestion is to perform the following steps :

• backup confluence db 7.13.8
• restore in a new db for confluence 8.5
• change collation of confluence 8.5 db
• perform upgrade on your confluence instance linked to the new db

It should fix your issue.

Fabio