Additional issues can appear with applications that display the natural encoding of the column (such as phpMyAdmin): they show the strange character sequences as seen above, instead of UTF-8 decoded characters. also returns 0 results. A better way to convert the character set of the table is to first convert the description column to a BLOB. Webjava,mysql,UTF8UTF-8ideaUTF-8JAVAutf-8web.xmlutf-8