The PostgreSQL switch

WebHare is switching from its builtin database server ('dbserver') to PostgreSQL. Experimental PostgreSQL support will be available in version 4.27. 

You can already start preparing for the switchover to make the switch as painless as possible (even though WebHare will keep support for both database servers for a while). Here's what you should do:

Stay up-to-date!

WebHare 4.26 is an unskippable upgrade so you should work towards updating all your servers to this version.

PostgreSQL will be a lot stricter than dbserver about text in the database and will generally reject invalid UTF-8 data unless a column is explicitly declared as binary. WebHare will try to avoid declaring binary columns as much as possible as invalid UTF-8 data is painful to work with.. and if we can avoid inserting it into the database and troublesome data will be stopped at insertion.

You should scan your installation for invalid UTF-8 data and fix it. Often you can just strip out incorrect data and reinsert it - if it was meant to be text, it was probably already corrupted anyway.

One source of invalid UTF-8 data are old hashed passwords which contained raw binary data. These may be present in WRD data, and you should scan your existing schemas using 'wh wrd:scannonutf8' (added in 4.26)

Watch the warnings!

WebHare 4.27 adds a lot of deprecations for dbserver-specific code. Make sure you 'wh checkmodule' all your modules to find these warnings. Even better: set up continuous integration to keep your modules tested against the development master for early deprecation warning.