hiii
first our DB server was on windows and we are working on a web application and we had this problem:
when arabic text is entered an exception came out :
Incorrect string value: '\xD8\xAA\xD8\xAA\xD8\xAA...' for column 'TEXT_AT' at row 1
and the text value is not saved in DB..
then we put :
(1) <property name="hibernate.connection.useUnicode">true</property>
(2) <property name="hibernate.connection.characterEncoding">UTF-8</property>
in the hibernate configuration file and the problem was solved .
But when we moved DB server to Linux the problem came out again !!!!!!
Now although we put the 2 lines (1) and (2) in the hibernate configuration file but the the tables are created with a Character set : cp 1252 West Europeon for varchar data type

Can u help me plz??

Hi!
I'm also using 3rd configuration line:
(3) <property name="hibernate.connection.charSet">UTF-8</property>

Please provide info which database you are using (exact version), your "hibernate.dialect" setting and "hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" setting.[/code]

database : mysql 5.0
hibernate.dialect : org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto : create

by the way i added the third line but it didn't work

As far as i remember adding 3rd config is enough (i have almost same configuration except that i'm using Mac OS X instead of linux - but they are both *nix systems)
hibernate.connection.charSet = UTF-8 should force DB tables creation using UTF-8 encoding, so you should manually drop you tables if they are created with different encoding.

Did you recreated DB tables?
Check which encoding they are using.

yes i recreated th DB and they are still using: cp 1252 West Europeon

it's driving me crazy

i think :
<property name="hibernate.connection.useUnicode">true</property>
<property name="hibernate.connection.characterEncoding">UTF-8</property>
<property name="hibernate.connection.charSet">UTF-8</property>

are used for the connection only but not to create DB tables that uses utf-8 ....

One more thing i'd recommend you to try is to completely drop your DB schema (backup important data before :) ) and create it with following command

replacing schema_name with your schema name

thanks a lot it worked :)