I use a php app that connects to mysql in Azure. I use utf8mb4 as encoding and utf8mb4_unicode_ci as collation.
Everything works as usual when I connect to Mysql without connection forwarding. When I enable connection forwarding in the php.ini as described here I get errors about malformed UTF-8 characters when processing the results of database queries. Could it be possible that connection forwarding changes the encoding? If yes, can I disable it somehow?