There are two options: Use the MySQL JDBC driver instead of the official MariaDB one. Explicitly set the collation and character set of either the database, table involved, or the table column used to store the string key before infinispan starts interacting with the DB. I believe different collation and character combos can be combined, however forcing utf8 seems to cause the least amount of problems: character-set-server=utf8mb4 collation-server=utf8mb4_unicode_ci