title: Storing Emoji character in AWS MySQL
body: <p>I'm having an Amazon Web Services hosted Spring + Hibernate application that's using a standard MySQL database. The application serves as a backend for an iPhone application. I'm trying to store Emoji characters entered on the iPhone in the MySQL database. I've done some research and found out that it requires 4 byte UTF-8 storage, which is supported since MySQL 5.5 with the utf8mb4 character set. However, this is not yet supported by AWS as an option in the Group Parameters.</p>
  
  <p>I'm looking for a good work around that still makes this possible. I know that one work around is storing the text as BLOB in the database but then I can no longer perform text queries on that text.</p>