Please use the mailinglist (openldap-source and -technical) for questions about using the software. This does not look like a bug, which is what the ITS system is for. This ITS will be closed.

Since I'm writing anyway though: Textual attributes in LDAP are as UTF-8. I'm not sure what chacter encoding you are using, but I assume it't something else.

As for base64, that's merely part of the LDIF file format, not how the value is represented in LDAP (nor SQL I presume). The '::' after the attribute names tells the client which reads the LDIF to base64-decode the provided value.