An UTF8 oddity

[Chris Devine]

Hello all. I am in the middle of upgrading a Perl/Catalyst/MySQL web all to use UTF8. All is going well except a problem saving to a table. I have traced that the UTF8 data is good up to (and into) MySql.

Table definition (partial):
CREATE TABLE `tblJD` (
`ID` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`GeneralDescription` longtext COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci,
PRIMARY KEY (`ID`),
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=2476 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

In the General Query log all is well: UPDATE tblJD SET generaldescription = 'Descripción' WHERE ( id = '2482' )

But if I do:
mysql> select GeneralDescription from JobDescriptions.tblJD WHERE ( id = '2482' );
+--------------------+
| GeneralDescription |
+--------------------+
| Descripción |
+--------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Oddly if I do:
mysql> UPDATE JobDescriptions.tblJD SET generaldescription = 'Descripción' WHERE ( id = '2482' );
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0

mysql> select GeneralDescription from JobDescriptions.tblJD WHERE ( id = '2482' );
+--------------------+
| GeneralDescription |
+--------------------+
| Descripción |
+--------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)


I would think if it got to the GQ log correctly, it should be in the field correctly.

What more info can I supply? What is going on?

TIA,
Chris