MySQL 8.0 and utf8mb4

[Chris Apperson]

I found myself having to migrate from 5.7 to 8.0 with the migration of AWS RDS version upgrade. I would like to keep everything latin1 character set and collation but for some reaosn it seems Workbench is forcing utf8mb4 on the character set.

Now I could set this variable at the beginning of each session but so would all the other developers evertime we logged in. Why does it seem that workbench is forcing this setting locally?

Things already tried
1. RDS parameter group does indeed reflect the latin1 value

2. The mysql client also reflects what the global setting is coming from the RDS parameter group of latin1

3. I cannot add a config file it seems as it is RDS and seems to be disabled.

4. When I run show variables like 'character%'; the only time I return a value of utf8mb4 is when running locally through workbench with no obvious way to make the change without setting each time a user logs in manually

5. Tried placing .ini files in the obvious locations and even tried to set a Env Variable with the value of latin1

Not sure why workbench would force this or why it would be so obcure on how to permanently change this locally when using workbench

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

-Chris