Jeff Moden (5/30/2016)
It's stupid. Even NOTEPAD supports UTF-8 but SQL Server does not until 2016.https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188365(v=sql.105).aspx
You can, however, pre-convert the file to UTF-16 to import. Supposedly, the code at http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/#downloading works. I've not tried it though. Normally when I get something in UTF-8, I send it back to them in Pig Latin. 😉
Careful here.
The meaning of "UTF-16" nowadays is not that fixed length unicode encoding as it was some time ago.
The file converter might be creating a file in that "new" UTF-16, not the one SQL Server can understand.
Therefore I used the name "UCS-2" - that would be certainly interpreted by SQL Server correctly.
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