Setting use_unicode=1 allows DBAPI to handle the encoding and decoding of unicode. We can see the details from the following url. http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/rel_0_9/dialects/mysql.html#unicode-encoding-decoding Change-Id: I4bb67d9c8a439ee18acdcf227140dfff1a70cd93 Closes-Bug: #1479313