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sql-serverutf-8

How to Use UTF-8 Collation in SQL Server database?

I've migrated a database from mysql to SQL Server (politics), original mysql database using UTF8.

Now I read https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/7346/sql-server-2005-2008-utf-8-collation-charset that SQL Server 2008 doesn't support utf8, is this a joke?

The SQL Server hosts multiple databases, mostly Latin-encoded. Since the migrated db is intended for web publishing, I want to keep the utf8-encoding. Have I missed something or do I need to enc/dec at application level?

Solution

  • No! It's not a joke.

    Take a look here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186939.aspx

    Character data types that are either fixed-length, nchar, or variable-length, nvarchar, Unicode data and use the UNICODE UCS-2 character set.

    And also here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16

    The older UCS-2 (2-byte Universal Character Set) is a similar character encoding that was superseded by UTF-16 in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard in July 1996.