ini: specify utf8 for sample MySQL connection strings By default, the MySQL stack will store unicode as UTF-8 encoded data in string fields, thus without using any unicode capabilities in the database. As described in http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/dialects/mysql.html#mysql-unicode , set charset=utf8 to actually put unicode in the database. Existing databases that already store utf8 in the database should keep using the old url. This will only support 16 bit code points, but utf8mb4 will double the key size and make them too big for MySQL.