Mailing List Archive

interpreting binary data in mediawikiuser table
I recently upgraded an older version of mediawiki to the recent version.
The upgrade seems to have changed the data in the mediawikiuser database
table from plaintext to a binary encoding. (My database is MySQL 8.0.)

I have some SQL scripts that try to read and write some of these fields
(mainly user_name, user_real_name, user_email, user_password), but the data
format change breaks these SQL scripts.

Could someone explain what binary encoding is being used, and how I might
change my SQL scripts so that they are able to read and write the data
using the binary encoding? (Or, alternatively, is there an option to not
use the binary encoding and to go back to using plain text?)

Thanks
Mike
Re: interpreting binary data in mediawikiuser table [ In reply to ]
Mysql shouldn't really make a distiction between binary and text, and you
should be able to edit them just normally.

I'm not sure how your script is failing but if its really an issue you
should be able to use the CAST operator in your sql query to change the
type.


We've been using binary for these fields since basically forever. I believe
the reason is really old versions of mysql had some really unfortunate
behaviour related to unicode, charsets and collations, and we wanted it to
just be consistent and not mess with things. I imagine most of those issues
arent as applicable in modern times with utf8mb4, but it still seems easier
to just make mysql not mess with encoding.

--
Brian

On Thursday, November 5, 2020, Mike Wertheim <mike.wertheim@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I recently upgraded an older version of mediawiki to the recent version.
> The upgrade seems to have changed the data in the mediawikiuser database
> table from plaintext to a binary encoding. (My database is MySQL 8.0.)
>
> I have some SQL scripts that try to read and write some of these fields
> (mainly user_name, user_real_name, user_email, user_password), but the data
> format change breaks these SQL scripts.
>
> Could someone explain what binary encoding is being used, and how I might
> change my SQL scripts so that they are able to read and write the data
> using the binary encoding? (Or, alternatively, is there an option to not
> use the binary encoding and to go back to using plain text?)
>
> Thanks
> Mike
>
>
Re: interpreting binary data in mediawikiuser table [ In reply to ]
Thank you sir

On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 9:43 PM Brian Wolff <bawolff@gmail.com> wrote:

> Mysql shouldn't really make a distiction between binary and text, and you
> should be able to edit them just normally.
>
> I'm not sure how your script is failing but if its really an issue you
> should be able to use the CAST operator in your sql query to change the
> type.
>
>
> We've been using binary for these fields since basically forever. I
> believe the reason is really old versions of mysql had some really
> unfortunate behaviour related to unicode, charsets and collations, and we
> wanted it to just be consistent and not mess with things. I imagine most of
> those issues arent as applicable in modern times with utf8mb4, but it still
> seems easier to just make mysql not mess with encoding.
>
> --
> Brian
>
> On Thursday, November 5, 2020, Mike Wertheim <mike.wertheim@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I recently upgraded an older version of mediawiki to the recent version.
>> The upgrade seems to have changed the data in the mediawikiuser database
>> table from plaintext to a binary encoding. (My database is MySQL 8.0.)
>>
>> I have some SQL scripts that try to read and write some of these fields
>> (mainly user_name, user_real_name, user_email, user_password), but the data
>> format change breaks these SQL scripts.
>>
>> Could someone explain what binary encoding is being used, and how I might
>> change my SQL scripts so that they are able to read and write the data
>> using the binary encoding? (Or, alternatively, is there an option to not
>> use the binary encoding and to go back to using plain text?)
>>
>> Thanks
>> Mike
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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