What is the difference between varchar and nvarchar?

Question

Is it just that nvarchar supports multibyte characters? If that is the case, is there really any point, other than storage concerns, to using varchars

Answer 1

I would say, it depends.

If you develop a desktop application, where the OS works in Unicode (like all current Windows systems) and language does natively support Unicode (default strings are Unicode, like in Java or C#), then go nvarchar.

If you develop a web application, where strings come in as UTF-8, and language is PHP, which still does not support Unicode natively (in versions 5.x), then varchar will probably be a better choice.