Hibernate's like or ilike restrictions and German umlauts

Question

I noticied that non of hibernate's ilike queries works with German umlauts such as ü, ö etc... As far as I understand it is a MySQL's issue.

I searched for the solutions and it seems there are only two:

1. Replace all the umlautes with the appropriate character sets. For example, ü with ue etc...
2. Semi-solution because I don't know how to implement it with hibernate described here and here

So the questions are: what is the better way and how to implement #2 with hibernate?

Thank you in advance