November 7, 2007 at 11:37 am
Hi,
I'm trying assess the impact of supporting UTF8 character sets on our Internet portal. What are the dos and donts of "internationalizing" our website in storing user data for user account type of information (e.g. username, password, address, etc.)? Are there performance and size considerations that I should be aware of?
Thanks!
D
November 8, 2007 at 10:50 pm
There are no UTF-8 character types in SQL so you will be using unicode types. Every character stored will take 2 bytes instead of 1. As to the absolute size of the database, it could potentially double depending on how many columns will have to use the unicode types. In terms of performance, the only real difference (other than having to process double the bytes) is in how many records will fit in a page; indexes may take a little longer to traverse if there are more pages.
If you are converting an existing application, it will probably be a bigger deal to convert code. You may also have issues with indexes exceeding the 900 byte limit, and potentially collation issues (sort order etc). You may want to ask questions in this forum if that is the case:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Forum230-1.aspx
Matt.
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