River Tarnell r.tarnell@IEEE.ORG wrote:
Are there any subtle options that need to be set on mysqldump to make sure the output is usable in that environment?
In previous versions of MySQL it was necessary to use 'mysqldump --default-character-set=latin1' if you had tables marked as Latin-1 which actually contained UTF-8 data. Otherwise, the dump would be corrupted and unusable.
I would check every table with
SHOW TABLE STATUS;
and check its character set (disguised in the Collation column) and use *that* character set in mysqldump (doing dumps table per table if necessary). Otherwise you are like to lose some data, or at least produce a dump that needs to be converted.
Dumping latin1 table as latin1 (even if it contains UTF-8 binary data) is the way to go (as river say), but dumping utf-8 as latin1 may not work as you want.
It is also a good idea to create another instance and restore tables from backup and see ho it looks like.
//Saper