[mythtv-users] Trying to fix utf8 database upgrade issues: a few schema questions

[Tom Dexter]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Tom Dexter <digitalaudiorock at gmail.com> wrote:
> I hoping to upgrade to 0.22 soon.  I'm running under Gentoo.  I
> performed the database backup/restore fix as described in the wiki:
>
> http://wiki.mythtv.org/wiki/Fixing_Corrupt_Database_Encoding
>
> ...back in November.
>
> I'm still unclear as to why, but I've been able to determine with some
> tests I've programmed that I'm going to run in a ton of database
> corruption errors when I try to upgrade.  In spite of the fact that I
> did everything exactly as per the wiki, it seems that subsequently
> continuing to run 0.21 has caused all sorts of problems with non-ASCII
> characters.
>
> I have WAY too many recordings to loose, so I'm going to fix it
> whatever it takes.  I do database programming so I think I can do it,
> but I have a few questions about the database schema that hopefully
> someone can answer:
>
> 1)  Are the ids in the "people" table (it's person column) referenced
> anywhere other than the credits and recordedcredits tables?  If not,
> is there any reason I can't delete any records that aren't referenced
> on either of them?
>
> 2)  Is the "oldprogram" table used for anything other than the program
> search for new titles?  That is, is it used for scheduling when
> filtering for non repeats or anything?
>
> That's it for now.
>

Well, as far as everything I can see in the source, it appears that
I'll be ok deleting the orphaned people records and clearing the
oldprogram table.  I was hoping someone could confirm that, but I'm
fairly sure I'll be ok.  In any case that's about my only hope of
fixing the database corruption.  That'ss get it to a manageable about
of data.

I'm still bothered by the fact that after fixing the database, even
with all my configs properly set to latin1, I've accumulated so many
apparently bad records...and they do in fact all appear to be records
created after the fix.  Based on everything I understand about the
issue that just doesn't add up.

Tom