Hibernate + MySQL: How to set the encoding utf-8 for database and tables

Question

My system runs on Linux Mandriva, RDBMS - MySQL 5. I need to have the database and tables created in UTF-8.

Here i

Answer 1

First of all on Java side you should specify UTF-8 instead of utf8, refer to table here.

Second, characterEncoding is not a character set your tables will be created in, this is just a charset that will be used while communication and reading/writing data to/from database.

MySQL Docs say that during the creation of tables, a DB charset will be used if nothing was specified in these regards. Which means that in order to make this possible, your database (not MySQL Server) should be created like that:

create database DB_NAME character set utf8;

Afterwards your tables in this database should be created in utf8 encoding. Same story with collation.

But of course you shouldn't rely on Hibernate's hbm2ddl, read here for more details.