[syslog-ng] set mysql charset & collation

I’m having a hard time getting the charset and collation of mysql tables set with syslog-ng: it needs to be utf8 (or utf8mb4) and from the documentation I’m under the impression that I can do something like this in order to set session variables: session-statements("set character_set_database=utf8mb4","set collation_database=utf8mb4_unicode_ci”) …however it’s not working - new tables are still being created as latin1. As far as I’m aware there’s also not a way to specify the charset/collation of a new table via syslog-ng either, right? Any ideas?