I have an old Sql Server db with a ‘free entry’ field that is being accessed via a Postgres 10.6 foreign table. This field contains a lot of garbage characters (higher than Ascii 128) which Postgres has a difficult time rendering and results in ‘empty looking’ records.
I say empty looking as I am able to query those missing records out of the foreign table using the regexp_replace function to substitute spaces for those problematic characters.
This leaves me with two questions:
1) The Postgres database encoding is UTF-8, so shouldn’t that be able to render any characters properly?
2) Since I can query it, the Postgres db is obviously processing this data at some level. Why does it display that entire field as blank until the special characters are replaced?
Best Answer
The ultimate answer turned out to be different encoding in the two databases. Thanks Erwin for steering me in that direction.
My apologies for not asking the question correctly. I am definitely out of my depth in this area.