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SQLServerDBA_Dan
Aged Yak Warrior
752 Posts |
 Posted - 2002-03-06 : 09:13:12
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| I guess I've really never understood the difference between the 2 except for that nvarchar has 4000 and varchar can have 8000 charactors. Other than size, is there some reason I should be choosing 1 over the other?DanielSQL Server DBA |
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robvolk
Most Valuable Yak
15732 Posts |
Posted - 2002-03-06 : 09:23:35
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| The national character set allows you to store all characters in any language (Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, some Chinese I think, and the Roman alphabet), so if you've got a multi-lingual database application you don't have to have multiple copies of the same database for each language, and you don't have to deal with code page translations. |
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Arnold Fribble
Yak-finder General
1961 Posts |
Posted - 2002-03-06 : 10:05:19
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| Given that UCS-2 can only represent codepoints in Unicode from 0000-FFFF, and Unicode defines (as of version 3.1) codepoints above this, it will be interesting to see what the next version of SQL Server does -- will there be a new UCS-4 native char type too? Or will nvarchar be redefined as being stored as UTF-16 but with a UTF-32/UCS-4 interface? Or UTF-16 all the way through? (I'm not even sure what that would mean!)Edited by - Arnold Fribble on 03/06/2002 10:31:57 |
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nvarchar and varchar