> My database uses mostly ISO-8859-1 charset on varchar fields.
>
> Which charset should i use to connect to the database to have the
> accents written correctly in the database?
>
> I suppose despite the platform the app will run from, all Java strings
> uses UTF-16 charset, so i should connect to the database using UTF-8,
> is it right?

You can use either UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 charsets. Both will work and there
should be no noticable performance penalty, though ISO-8859-1 might be
slightly faster.

Roman