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(a)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