Alternative migration process

Moodle1.6

If, to meet Moodle 1.6 requirement, you are upgrading your MySQL server also, you can apply this strategy (tested converting database from MySQL 4.0.x to 5.0.x):

• ensure your Moodle site use only one encoding (eg. all courses use a latin1/ISO-8859-1 language)
• put your Moodle site off line
• export your data from old server; MySQL 4.0.x uses 8 bit encoding by default, so data will be dump in the same encoding of your Moodle site:

mysqldump -h <old mysql host> -u <moodle db user> -p <old moodle db name> > dbdump.sql

• upgrade your MySQL server
• upgrade your Moodle; remeber to install UTF-8 version of all require languages
• create your new Moodle database and set appropriate privileges
• re-import your data (MySQL 5.x uses UTF-8 encoding, suppose your data is ISO-8859-1 encoded)

mysql -h <new mysql host> -u <moodle db user> -p --default-character-set=latin1 <new moodle db name> < dbdump.sql

• MySQL will convert character encoding automatically.
• Now, you must update some data; from a mysql console:

update mdl_config set value=concat(value, '.utf8') where name='locale';
update mdl_config set value=concat(value, '_utf8') where name='lang';
update mdl_course set modinfo=null;
update mdl_course set lang=concat(lang, '_utf8') where length(lang) > 1;
update mdl_user set lang=concat(lang, '_utf8') where length(lang) > 1;
update mdl_config set value='true' where name='unicodedb';

• update your Moodle config.php to use new server and uncomment $CFG->unicodedb = true;
• put on line your Moodle site.

For a medium size database, migration require only 3-4 minutes.