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

If a single byte is used to store a character, there are 256 possible combinations, and thereby you can save 256 different characters. Collation is the pattern which defines the characters and the rules by which they are compared and sorted.

1252, which is the Latin1 (ANSI), is the most common. Single-byte character sets are also inadequate to store all the characters used by many languages. For example, some Asian languages have thousands of characters, so they must use two bytes per character.

Unicode standard

When systems using multiple code pages are used in a network, it becomes difficult to manage communication. To standardize things, the ISO and Unicode consortium introduced the Unicode. Unicode uses two bytes to store each character. That is 65,536 different characters can be defined, so almost all the characters can be covered with Unicode. If two computers use Unicode, every symbol will be represented in the same way and no conversion is needed - this is the idea behind Unicode.

SQL Server has two categories of character datatypes:

• non-Unicode (char, varchar, and text)
• Unicode (nchar, nvarchar, and ntext)

If we need to save character data from multiple countries, always use Unicode.