Why doesn't SQL Server CE support varchar?

sql-server-ce
Edward Tanguay picture Edward Tanguay · Feb 23, 2009 · Viewed 7.5k times · Source

I was creating a table in SQL Server CE and realized it doesn't support varchar.

Looking this up, I found that "non-Unicode text columns (varchar, char, text) and smallmoney are not supported; although nvarchar, nchar, ntext, and money are supported" as stated at MSDN.

Is this true? Why is this, exactly? It would seem that a compact database would support data types that take less bytes to store...I'm assuming it takes more space to save the Unicode characters.

What is the reasoning behind this?

Answer

Steven Robbins picture Steven Robbins · Feb 23, 2009

It's probably because Windows CE is completely Unicode based and all of it's strings are stored that way.

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