Currently, it's enforced in devstack through setting encoding in connection URI. It would be beneficial if oslo.db handles that on its own, so that we can - remove those connection arguments from devstack; - more importantly, not rely on users to set it in all affected projects. Oursql and MySQLdb also require use_unicode=0 to avoid performance drop. Change-Id: I676c9c5e418905160e4ab647b8a0f2fb601e8962 Closes-Bug: 1340779