Question

When running FogBugz on top of a MySQL database, I keep getting the following types of errors:

The Fog Creek Maintenance Service has reported an error. (-2147467259) System.Data: Incorrect string value: '\x...' for column 'sHTML' at row 1

What gives?

Answer 1

This answer is a work in progress (i.e. may change as we learn more about the underlying cause of this error).

First, connect to MySQL from a command prompt and run the following statements:

mysql> use [name_of_your_fogbugz_database_here];
Database changed
mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%olla%';

You should get back something like the following:

+----------------------+-------------------+
| Variable_name        | Value             |
+----------------------+-------------------+
| collation_connection | utf8_general_ci   |
| collation_database   | latin1_swedish_ci |
| collation_server     | utf8_general_ci   |
+----------------------+-------------------+

The problem is that the collation and/or character set being used for your FogBugz database (collation_database) does not match the collation/character set being used by FogBugz' database connection (collation_connection).

To correct this, modify your database connection string (Admin -> Site -> Database) to include "charset=latin1".

So, for example, if your connection string is currently something like this:

Driver={mySQL};Server=localhost;Database=fogbugz;User=[user];Password=[password];

It would become something like this:

Driver={mySQL};Server=localhost;Database=fogbugz;User=[user];Password=[password];CharSet=latin1;

Answer 2

If you do got access to the my.ini file that were created during the mysql install, you can change those settings there. Good luck!