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Does SQL Server support UTF-8?
Understanding the Encoding Differences Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SQL Server Express do not support UTF-8 at the database level. They support nchar, nvarchar, and ntext to store fixed format Unicode data (UTF-16).
What is the advantage of UTF-8?
Spatial efficiency is a key advantage of UTF-8 encoding. If instead every Unicode character was represented by four bytes, a text file written in English would be four times the size of the same file encoded with UTF-8. Another benefit of UTF-8 encoding is its backward compatibility with ASCII.
Should I always use UTF-8?
The answer is that UTF-8 is by far the best general-purpose data interchange encoding, and is almost mandatory if you are using any of the other protocols that build on it (mail, XML, HTML, etc). However, UTF-8 is a multi-byte encoding and relatively new, so there are lots of situations where it is a poor choice.
Are ASCII and UTF-8 the same?
For characters represented by the 7-bit ASCII character codes, the UTF-8 representation is exactly equivalent to ASCII, allowing transparent round trip migration. Other Unicode characters are represented in UTF-8 by sequences of up to 6 bytes, though most Western European characters require only 2 bytes3.
Is there support for UTF-8 in SQL Server 2019?
With the first public preview of SQL Server 2019, we announced support for the widely used UTF-8 character encoding as an import or export encoding, and as database-level or column-level collation for string data.
How to see UTF-8 collations in SQL Server 2019?
You can see all available UTF-8 collations by executing the bellow command in your SQL Server 2019 CTP: SELECT Name, Description FROM fn_helpcollations () WHERE Name like ‘%UTF8’; Additionally, if your dataset uses primarily Latin characters, significant storage savings may also be achieved as compared to UTF-16 data types.
What do you need to know about UTF-8 support?
In the first example, we want 0% of the rows to contain UTF-8 data, and 0 of the characters inside any row to contain UTF-8 data. This is why we insert no rows containing the Canada flags, and 10,000 rows of 50 periods.
How many rows are UTF-8 in SQL Server?
Percentage of rows containing UTF-8 data (0%, 50%, 100%); and, Number of characters in each row that is UTF-8 data (0 characters, 25 characters, and 50 characters): This script produces 81 rows of output, with table definitions like the following (they are not pretty scripts, of course):