utf 8 - How to Use UTF-8 Collation in SQL Server database?

Question

I've migrated a database from mysql to SQL Server (politics), original mysql database using UTF8.

Now I read https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/7346/sql-server-2005-2008-utf-8-collation-charset that SQL Server 2008 doesn't support utf8, is this a joke?

The SQL Server hosts multiple databases, mostly Latin-encoded. Since the migrated db is intended for web publishing, I want to keep the utf8-encoding. Have I missed something or do I need to enc/dec at application level?

Answer 1

UTF-8 is not a character set, it's an encoding. The character set for UTF-8 is Unicode. If you want to store Unicode text you use the nvarchar data type.

If the database would use UTF-8 to store text, you would still not get the text out as encoded UTF-8 data, you would get it out as decoded text.

You can easily store UTF-8 encoded text in the database, but then you don't store it as text, you store it as binary data (varbinary).