Upgrading the database.

[dqadri]

Hello!

I have been in the process of upgrading my MariaDB install. I had started with Open Dental when MySQL 5.0 was still in vogue, and upgraded to MariaDB sometime after the Mysql-MariaDB fork was established. Recently I found myself upgrading hardware and went to check my database version, and I was still on 10.5. I have now upgraded all the way up to 10.11.16 without any issues. I'm exploring moving up to a current GA release (currently 12.2.2).

Back when my database was originally created, utf8 was the default character set and life was simple. Now with emojis and other unicode text floating around, utf8mb4 is the default for new databases and new installations, but I have not yet converted my old database to the modern character set.

I'm going to do a conversion on a test server with a full copy of my data, and then test the Open Dental client against that server. Does anyone have any insight into this process, questions or concerns? It seems like it has to be done table by table like mentioned below:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/728 ... to-utf8mb4