Since we only support latin1 encoding at the moment for MySQL, we should specify in the connection JDBC URL characterEncoding=latin1 and useUnicode=true. This is important if the users have installed their MySQL to use UTF8 as their default encoding. If this isn't implemented, it can lead to illegal collation errors.

This should be revisited after implementing utf8 support in Crowd for MySQL.

useUnicode=true sounds a bit counter-intuitive but according to MySQL's docs, the characterEncoding parameter is only evaluated if useUnicode is true.