NVARCHAR versus VARCHAR

re: NVARCHAR versus VARCHAR

Joquim Félix — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:36:49 GMT

Honestly I don't see any difference in practical terms regarding the Portuguese language and the currency symbol €. Made a simple test with a table with 2 columns, one NVARCHAR and another VARCHAR. Insert text with characters such as é, â, ã, ç and € in both columns and it all seems the same. Didn't get any errors or warnings.

Even executing a select on the data seems OK.

I'm missing something?

Never the less good post and good explanation on NVARCHAR and VARCHAR differences.

re: NVARCHAR versus VARCHAR

Ben — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:27:15 GMT

Wouldn't nVarchars be slower in sorting, searching and joining because the processor has to look at twice as many bits to perform any action?

re: NVARCHAR versus VARCHAR

PGN — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:57:04 GMT

What Anthony said above about the query issue joining nvarchar to varchar is a known bug. I had the same issue and resolved by making both varchar.

re: NVARCHAR versus VARCHAR

Dave — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:12:18 GMT

What about conversion issues since ADO.NET uses Unicode and indexing etc. searching for varchar with an nvarchar parameter? Does that blow the indexing?

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re: NVARCHAR versus VARCHAR

Badri — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:49:44 GMT

I totally agree, If you don't need it shouldn't be using NVarchar as size of data increases, transmission time increses. Good Article

re: NVARCHAR versus VARCHAR

Gary Howlett — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:11:41 GMT

Space may not be a problem these days, however I typically see the bigger the database the longer it may take to perform IO intensive queries.

Of course 1/2 the field size dosent mean 2x the query speed however what about when transmitting the data? espically over slower network.

Also why not use a user defined datatype, so if you do need to change the type the task is a little easier.

re: NVARCHAR versus VARCHAR

Xiara — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:11:18 GMT

Since data-storage is not the problem anymore, I allways use nvarchar.

re: NVARCHAR versus VARCHAR

Karim — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:15:14 GMT

Short and sweet dude. Took me longer to write this comment than to get my answer.

re: NVARCHAR versus VARCHAR

Jack — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:35:11 GMT

Yes, It really takes twice as much space at all times. The reason you declare how long a varchar or nvarchar is so that the Database App can reserve a specified amount of space for that variable. If you have a field set up as varchar(15) and your data is only 3 characters long, it will still take up 15 characters of storage because that is how much space the Database App reserved.