A coworker of mine in the UK has been having problems with inserting UTF8 Strings into Cassandra using the Ruby thrift client. I'm just wondering if anyone else is seeing this or if they have a workaround. It may have to do with ruby/thrift itself: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-1224. Looks like Bryan Duxbury has an idea of what might help at that level. For informational purposes, I asked him what clients/gems he's tried and he sent the following. We are using a bunch of gems. From high-level to low-level: cassandra 0.11.1 [1], thrift_client 0.6.2 [2], thrift 0.6.0 [3]. As you can see in the issue I linked above, I believe the problem to be in the ruby implementation of the thrift library. Ruby 1.9 might have something to do with the issue (since in 1.9 character encoding is enforced more strictly). [1] https://github.com/fauna/cassandra [2] https://github.com/fauna/thrift_client [3] http://rubygems.org/gems/thrift