Can I configure Amazon RDS to use UTF-8?

By default RDS uses latin1 as default character set. This can be easily modified by changing the DB Parameter Group that the RDS is assigned to. 


Try: 


rds-modify-db-parameter-group my_db_parameter_group \ --parameters="name=character_set_server, value=utf8, method=immediate" \ --parameters="name=collation_server, value=utf8_general_ci, method=immediate"


This will change RDS to use UTF-8. 


Once you do it make sure you reboot your RDS instance and verify that changes have been taken place by following below: 

rds-reboot-db-instance my_db

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%character_set_%';
+--------------------------+-------------------------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | VALUE                                           |
+--------------------------+-------------------------------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                                            |
| character_set_connection | utf8                                            |
| character_set_database   | utf8                                            |
| character_set_filesystem | BINARY                                          |
| character_set_results    | utf8                                            |
| character_set_server     | utf8                                            |
| character_set_system     | utf8                                            |