 <p>I recommend that you store your data in MySQL in UTF-8 form, rather than try to convince it to take Windows-native UTF-16. If your text is mostly Western, UTF-8 encoding will be more compact, and it will be more likely to work with the C-and-Unix nature of MySQL.</p> <p>There are Visual C++ specific examples in <a href="http://tangentsoft.net/mysql++/" rel="nofollow">MySQL++</a> that show how to do this. See <code>CExampleDlg::ToUTF8()</code> and the functions that call it in <code>examples/vstudio/mfc/mfc_dlg.cpp</code>, for example.</p> <p>There's <a href="http://tangentsoft.net/mysql++/doc/html/userman/unicode.html" rel="nofollow">a chapter</a> in <a href="http://tangentsoft.net/mysql++/doc/html/userman/" rel="nofollow">the MySQL++ user manual</a> that gives the whys and wherefores behind all this.</p>