I’ve been enjoying the services of Heroku recently. Heroku exemplifies cloud computing for developers, with simple tools to deploy your Ruby on Rails application.

While uploading a development database to Heroku, I encountered the following error: 75% |================================== | ETA: 00:00:06 Saving session to push_201102111450.dat.. !!! Caught Server Exception HTTP CODE: 500 Taps Server Error: PGError: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xae HINT: This error can also happen if the byte sequence does not match the encoding expected by the server, which is controlled by "client_encoding".

Google searches failed to discover an easy fix.

To elaborate on the error a bit, my database contained a byte sequence that Heroku’s Taps Server did not allow under UTF-8 encoding. I’m not sure how this byte sequence got in. My SQLite database also used UTF-8 encoding, but apparently SQLite had been more tolerant of byte sequences when I imported the data.

In any case, it was worth noting that I had a progress indicator (“75%” above) on the specific table that contained the bad byte sequence.

When I viewed the table in a web page and scrolled down approximately 75% of the way down, I found some strange characters. When I edited the offending characters out of the table, the database push worked.

Of course, the web page view had to use the default ordering of the data. I was lucky that the run-time ordering of the data (used in my web page view) was the same as the push-time ordering of the data.