[rt-users] Simple searches hardly return any tickets; suspect pgsql encoding issue

[Lee Roth]

I have an old RT install that's not been used for a few years (long story, will not posted here) that has about 3000 tickets.

At different points during its dormancy, I did occasional RT upgrades just to keep in touch with what features the current RT has; I'm now at RT V3.8.8.

At one point I actually had to migrate my RT install to a different platform & a newer version of Postgres - I dumped/exported the old db, moved it to the future system, and reloaded it into the new Postgres.

Recently, I decided to blow the dust off of this install and upgrade it to the current RT V4.x since the "political atmosphere" that killed my use of RT a few years ago could now be changing.

Problem: Simple searches hardly return any matches except for very recent tickets; using fulltext:<keyword> doesn't work well either. I suspect that (maybe) during the migration to the other platform, I did a dump of the database and a reload and the new database wasn't the same character encoding (it is now SQL_ASCII). I'm not sure what the old char encoding was, maybe UTF8?

I can call up individual tickets using the ticket ID and they look fine on the screen; but I cannot search and find any of the text except the very newest tickets.

I'd like to get my searches working again to demo the RT product... does anyone have a suggestion on how to do an analysis of what the exact mess I currently have and how to proceed with a fix? Or if it isn't a DB char encoding issue at all?

I don't mind doing a complete re-install of RT V4.x from scratch, but I'd hate to discard the 3K tickets worth of data that would be quite nice to use to demo the current RT.

Thanks!

Lee Roth