I wouldn't expect many software implementations to implement emojis outside of social media. Personally, I don't see them as having any place in a professional environment at all. That being said, I assume they are just a series of special characters that the end user program knows how to interpret, son this forum for instance colon and the text smileyhappy and another colon is interpreted as a smiley face. So oracle would not store a smiley face, it would store the code needed by the end user to interpret that code as smiley face. Does that make sense, you are providing something which the end product knows how to render, not the render itself.