How do I get hibernate to understand that I want to search on swedish letters?

Restrictions.like("name", "Å%")

returns everything starting with a A or Å not only Å.
The same goes for Ä. For Ö it returns everything starting with O and Ö.

If you cant see the letter because of some encoding problem, its a A with one dot above.

Thanks!

You should verify if this is hibernate code messing with it, or your database (as I think that's more likely) can you have your app log the statement and try performing yourself on a console?

Also you might want to give a try to Hibernate Search, it really focuses on solving this kind of problems in most efficient way - and doesn't have database encoding problems.