Issue
I can't view certain tables in an external postgreSQL tool after successfully connecting to the Benchling data warehouse.
Example error message: "Error returned: 'OLE DB or ODBC error: [DataSource.Error] ODBC: ERROR [22P05] ERROR: character with byte sequence 0xce 0xb2 in encoding "UTF8" has no equivalent in encoding "WIN1252";"
Environment
External connections to Benchling data warehouse using a third-party tool like Power BI, Tableau, etc. The connection was successful, but certain tables can't load and instead display the error message above.
Cause
The warehouse uses UTF-8 text encoding. A third-party tool connected to the warehouse might use different character encoding that can't interpret some text characters in a warehouse table. Greek letters, scientific symbols, and other special characters entered in metadata fields could cause this error.
To review full list of special characters encoding, visit the UTF-8 character table.
Solution
Configure your third-party analytics tool to use UTF-8 encoding to match Benchling's warehouse.
If this isn't possible, use Insights to find what field the special character(s) was/were entered into and replace it with English text.