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utf-8 or utf-16?

  • April 5, 2012 at 10:54 pm

    #271590

    How can we find out what format unicode data is used in a table,utf-8 or utf-16 format?

  • April 6, 2012 at 1:41 am

    #1469966

    I think that utf-8 is used in SQL SERVER 2008 r2 and before. The new SC (supplementary character) sets are available in SQL SERVER 2012.

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143503.aspx

    Fitz

  • April 6, 2012 at 9:47 pm

    #1470355

    SQL Server 2008 does not use UTF-8 anywhere in terms of storing data internally, and neither does SQL 2012.

    SQL 2008 stores unicode data using UCS-2, a subset of UTF-16LE (the LE is implied in their documentation) for National types like NVARCHAR and NCHAR. It stores XML data as UTF-16 internally.

    Things have improved slightly in SQL 2012 with respect to the National types as UTF-16 is now supported (i.e. multi-bytes characters are interpeted properly), however only when using a Supplementary Character collation.

    Collation and Unicode Support (2012)

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