UTF-8 only in Grails database tables

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

Apparently you have to hack your way around by defining your own custom SQL dialect for Hibernate (which Grails uses for persistence).

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

also the default character encoding must be set for the database during creating

CREATE DATABASE databaseName DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;