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

sql-server utf-8
Teson picture Teson · Sep 20, 2012 · Viewed 200.7k times · Source

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

Guffa picture Guffa · Aug 20, 2015

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).

Related questions

Using StringWriter for XML Serialization

I'm currently searching for an easy way to serialize objects (in C# 3). I googled some examples and came up with something like: MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream ( ); XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer ( typeof ( MyObject) ); XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter ( memoryStream, Encoding.UTF8 ); xs.…

Read More
How to write UTF-8 characters using bulk insert in SQL Server?

I am doing a BULK INSERT into sqlserver and it is not inserting UTF-8 characters into database properly. The data file contains these characters, but the database rows contain garbage characters after bulk insert execution. My first suspect was the …

Read More
How to solve "unable to switch the encoding" error when inserting XML into SQL Server

I'm trying to insert into XML column (SQL SERVER 2008 R2), but the server's complaining: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): XML parsing: line 1, character 39, unable to switch the encoding I found out that the XML column has to be UTF-16 in …

Read More