How to work with special characters in Google Data Studio and MySQL

I find myself struggling to get special characters to work all the time. German Umlaute, but also cyrillic characters cause problems in many applications. This time I needed to get special characters working on a dataset from a MySQL connection within Google Data Studio. Connecting to the database was working fine, but the data was displayed with hieroglyphs.

Solution

The solution is to customize the JDBC connection string Data Studio will create automatically when using the default form. Head into the connection settings and switch from ‘Basic’ to ‘JDBC URL’.

Add the following string to the end of the URL:

?useUnicode=yes&characterEncoding=UTF-8

You can change the encoding standard to your needs or match it with what you have set in your database. Reauthenticate and Reconnect to apply your settings.