Laravel MSSQL AWS RDS General error 20018 Unicode data

Question

I'm using SQL Server with a Laravel 5.4 Project but when I use Laravel\Socialite it returns an error in my handler.

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 20018 Unicode data in a Unicode-only collation or ntext data cannot be sent to clients using DB-Library (such as ISQL) or ODBC version 3.7 or earlier. [20018] (severity 16) [(null)] (SQL: select top 1 * from [social_logins] where [social_id] = 109095424026454018110 and [provider] = google)

Some answers on Google/StackOverflow say that I have to change the TDS version to 8.0 and client charset but I have my database in an RDS on Amazon Web Services and can't change it (me noob).

Answer 1

The problem was using select * in the Laravel way.

$userRes = User::where('email', '=', $user->email)->first();

So i added select('column1','column1') like this

$userRes = User::select('id','email')->where('email', '=', $user->email)->first();

Then everything is working well.

Answer 2

You can try to add "version" and/or "charset" to your database config.

'sqlsrv' => [
    'driver' => 'sqlsrv',
    'url' => env('DATABASE_URL'),
    'host' => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
    'port' => env('DB_PORT', '1433'),
    'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
    'username' => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
    'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
    'charset' => 'utf8', // <-- this
    'version' => '8.0', // <-- and this
    'prefix' => '',
    'prefix_indexes' => true,
    // 'encrypt' => env('DB_ENCRYPT', 'yes'),
    // 'trust_server_certificate' => env('DB_TRUST_SERVER_CERTIFICATE', 'false'),
],