Sql what is the difference between varchar and nvarchar

If you settled on varchar from the start, you have a lot work to clean this up. To the extent that it may not be possible. Thus, selecting nvarchar for name columns and similar may be more future-proof. The one thing to keep in mind here that when you say varchar 20 this is 20 bytes.

Using nvarchar data type is easier to manage character data in international databases because nvarchar data type column can store any Unicode data. The disadvantage of nvarchar data type is that it may use up a lot of extra storage space.

Please refer to this article which might help. UTF-8 has been brought up here. I strongly encourage you to read below article before going that route.

To store data as characters, numeric values and special characters in a database, there are 4 data types that can be used. So what is the difference among all 4 of these data types? If the value provided to a variable of CHAR data type is shorter than the length of a column of declared the size of the variable, then the value would be right-padded with blanks to match the size of column length.

View All. Pradeep Shet Updated date May 27, As you know we represent the character values within single quotes, for example 'Robin'.

But some experts recommends nvarchar always because: since all modern operating systems and development platforms use Unicode internally, using nvarchar rather than varchar, will avoid encoding conversions every time you read from or write to the database.

For nvarchar, when using characters defined in the Unicode range ,, one character can be stored per each byte-pair, however, in higher Unicode ranges 65,,, one character may use two byte-pairs. Whereas varchar only uses 1 byte. By the way, starting with SQL Server SQL Server differences of char, nchar, varchar and nvarchar data types. If the response is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it, thank you. Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

I would not go this route, unless I have some very special circumstances. Hello TiborKaraszi and Cathyji-msft. Unfortunately, the SQL Server Central version of it is woefully outdated as their blog mirroring no longer refreshes when the original is updated.

For a lot of posts that doesn't matter so much. They ended up improving it a bit so it's not so bad now, but still best in a couple of scenarios. Please see my answer below for details. Thanks SolomonRutzky I didn't know you have two versions of the article out there. I do point to your article on a couple of my classes, and that is indeed your QuantumLeap link.

For above post, I googled to find your blog quickly, and missed that it wasn't the same as I point to in my classes. Good to know there are two out there and which to point to.

Twitter Facebook Github Instagram Twitch. In this article i will differentiate between varchar, nvarchar data type. About the Varchar: It is a variable that has a length data type.

It is use to store non-Unicode characters. It Occupy 1 byte of space for each character.