Transferring data from MSSQL to UTF-8 encoded MySQL database

[Takis Bouyouris]

Hello all! I have been trying to transfer data from a table in MSSQL to an identical table in MySQL (MySQL 4.1). I am a Java developer and I use JDBC (mysql-connector 3.1.11). The thing is that the the table in MSSQL are encoded in MSSQL's default encoding which is iso-8859-1 - I think -, but the the MySQL table is UTF-8 encoded! I managed to do the transfer right only by converting the encoding in this way: CONVERT(_latin5? USING utf8).

I used _latin1 of course at first but only some of the characters (greek characters) were transferred correctly. I experimented and found out that by using _latin5 all the data were transferred OK! By that, I mean that I can retrieve them from MysQL from a JSP or a Servlet and output them to HTML and see the actual greek characters that I expect to see.

I do have utf8 in all parameters of my MySQL server instance and also in the JDBC query string. If anybody knows the reason for this behaviour I would be glad to hear it.

PS: I have made the exact same post in the MSSQL forum but on second thoughts (and no replies) maybe this is a better place for this problem.