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

how about change database collation?

ALTER DATABASE [database] CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

Answer 2

How to change the encoding to UTF-8?

I used a local dialect class that extended the MySQLDialect and changed the table-type string:

public class LocalMysqlDialect extends MySQLDialect {
    @Override
    public String getTableTypeString() {
        return " DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8";
    }
}

I was actually extending the MySQL5InnoDBDialect type so I was really using:

public class LocalMysqlDialect extends MySQL5InnoDBDialect {
    @Override
    public String getTableTypeString() {
        return " ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8";
    }
}

Answer 3

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.