SQLBits 2023

Thē wönderfűl wôrld of ćollåtions, eñcodingß and téxt sţoræge

Once you get to talking or thinking about characters, collations, encodings, sort orders, diacritics, code pages, etc, a brain melt is what you end up with. In this session we'll look at what all of these things are, how they all fit together.
In today's world the chances of having data in a single language are slim to none.
Your customers speak and write many languages with many different letters.
Once you get to talking or thinking about characters, collations, encodings,
sort orders, diacritics, code pages, etc, a brain melt is what you end up with.
In this session we'll look at what all of these things are, how they fit together
and how to use them properly as each of them can break your applications in various ways.
Since SQL Server 2019 brought improvements in UTF-8 area, we'll look at that as well.
Because sometimes it's not enough to just use NChar or NVarChar and thinking everything will be ok.