UTF error

[Naota]

hi.
working with sqlalchemy in pylons i found that i need use LIKE
operator. It looked for binary data only. But sqlalchemy stores data
in database in it's own format. DB encoding is unicode, sqlalchemy is
at default settings. So if execute Session.execute("SET NAMES UTF8")
command before transaction, then all works fine. But this is method is
not good to use. Please, could u help me to setup correct work with
UTF.
Best regards...