Hello all, I'm trying to pull table data from databricks tables that contain foreign language characters in UTF-8 into an ETL tool using a JDBC connection. I'm using the latest Simba Spark JDBC driver available from the Databricks website.

The issue is that when the data comes over all of the foreign language and special characters are converted to junk characters. I have searched for any configuration setting for using unicode or UTF-8 with the JDBC url or config settings but couldn't find anything. The ODBC version of the Simba drive does have a property called "UseUnicodeSqlCharacterTypes" which if enabled the ODBC connector returns SQL_WVARCHAR for STRING and VARCHAR columns, and returns SQL_WCHAR for CHAR columns.

There doesn't seem to be anything I can do for the JDBC driver. Is there some other JDBC driver or some other method I can try to get the properly encoded unicode data over JDBC? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.