(This may be related to #559772, but I'm not sure; the bug description is too vague.)

First of all, a big "thank you" to all GnuCash developers. I am especially hyped about the new SQL backend, which opens up a whole new range of possibilites with GnuCash.

My problem has to do with how non-ASCII characters are stored in a MySQL backend. It seems like a familiar problem, namely that application (GnuCash) uses UTF-8 internally, while the MySQL connection character set is set to Latin-1.

If this is the case, one solution is to execute
 SET NAMES "utf8";
after connecting to the MySQL backend. I believe the mysql_set_character_set() function may be used to the same effect.

Note that this will cause encoding problems for people who upgrade from previous versions of GnuCash.