JPA utf-8 characters not persisted

use the character encoding in the property of persistence.xml file

<property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.url" 
   value="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/blogdatabase?useUnicode=yes&amp;characterEncoding=UTF-8"/>

This helped in Spring Boot:

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/securitydb?useUnicode=yes&characterEncoding=UTF-8

This solved it nicely:

<property name="hibernate.connection.useUnicode" value="true" />
<property name="hibernate.connection.characterEncoding" value="UTF-8" />

Edit: with hibernate 4.3.1 this works:

<property name="connection.useUnicode">true</property>
<property name="connection.characterEncoding">utf-8</property>