This is how my connection is set: Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(url + dbName + \"?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8\", userName, password
Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(url + dbName + \"?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8\", userName, password
Droppping schema and recreating it with utf8mb4 character set solved my issue.
utf8mb4