Switching from MariaDB to Postgres

Question

Hello,

We are upgrading from Jira DC 8.5.1(using MariaDB) to 8.13.7.  (using Postgres 11) and when I tried to import the XML backup taken before the upgrade, I get the following error

ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x00)) java.lang.Exception: com.atlassian.jira.exception.DataAccessException: org.ofbiz.core.entity.GenericEntityException:

Attached is the screenshot of the full error

Postgres was setup per the instruction in the link below

Connecting Jira applications to PostgreSQL | Administering Jira applications Data Center and Server 8.5 | Atlassian Documentation

What could be causing the issue, is it that MariaDB was setup with UTF8 and Postgres was setup with UNICODE? How can we resolve the issue at hand?

Ziad Qadora · Answer

Hi Nic,

Thank you very much.

Will get 9.6 installed and follow the recommended advice.

Regards,

Ziad

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

I don't think you started to do it quite the way I described.  I said you need to move to a supported database (Postgres 9.6) first, not try to take a Jira 8.5 from an unsupported database (maria) to another unsupported database (postgres 11).  MySQL to Postgres has similar problems, but you're not using MySQL, you said you're on Maria.

You are looking too far into the later releases and trying to do too much in one go.  You need to start by moving from an unsupported database (maria) on Jira 8.5.1 to a supported database (postgres 9.6) on Jira 8.5.1

Once you've achieved that, the rest of your upgrades (Jira 8.5.1 -> Jira 8.13.latest, then postgres 9.6 -> 11) will be very smooth.

Ziad Qadora · Answer

Hi,

I started doing that way, and the health check did find Postgres 11 as un-supported for 8.5.1.

I did find this documentation of the issue, so this seems to be a known issue when switching from MySQL to Postgres

Removing invalid characters from XML backups | Atlassian Support | Atlassian Documentation