I am using Emoji character in my project. That characters are saved (??) into mysql database. I had used database Default collation in utf8mb4_general_ci. It sh
utf8mb4_general_ci
The main point hasn't been mentioned in the above answers that,
We need to pass query string with the options "useUnicode=yes" and "characterEncoding=UTF-8" in connection string
"useUnicode=yes"
"characterEncoding=UTF-8"
Something like this
mysql://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOSTNAME:PORT/DATABASE_NAME?useUnicode=yes&characterEncoding=UTF-8