My name is James Anderson and I am a SQL Server production DBA in the south of the UK. I have been working with databases since 2008. The first RDBMS I worked on was Paradox and I never want to see it again. I quickly moved to using T-SQL in SQL Server 2005. I have worked on every version of the product since. I enjoy query tuning and server optimisation. I detest transactional replication.

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Where Your Value Separates You from Others

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Fixing the Error

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T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: Encoding Functions

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Question of the Day

Fixing the Error

On SQL Server 2025, I have a database that has this collation: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. I decide I want to run this code: 

SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C*3068 and good night', '*') AS 'A Classic';
I get this error:Msg 9844, Level 16, State 4, Line 24 The char/varchar input type uses an unsupported collation. Only a UTF8 collation is supported with char/varchar input type in UNISTR function.What is the easiest way to fix this error?

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