Question

When using Grails 1.0.4 together with a MySQL the charsets of the auto-generated database tables seem to default to ISO-8859-1. I’d rather have everything stored as pure UTF-8. Is that possible?

From the auto-generated database definitions:

ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

Note the “latin1” part.

Answer 1

Most MySQL installations default to latin1, so if not instructed otherwise, the driver will go by the default values. It should suffice to prepend the charset directives in the connection URL, for example:

jdbc:mysql://localhost/databaseName?useUnicode=yes&characterEncoding=UTF-8

For this to work, the MySQL Connector JAR must be of version 5 (3.x will not work).

Source: MySQL Reference manual: Using Character Sets and Unicode