How to change character encoding to a column ?

• spectra

  SSCarpal Tunnel

  Points: 4120

  More actions

  June 22, 2017 at 5:50 am

  #338264

  How to change character encoding to a column ?

  when I run this :

  SELECT collation_name FROM sys.columns
  WHERE name = 'FILENAME'
  AND [object_id] = OBJECT_ID('dbo.ATTACHMENT');

  I get :  SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

  I want to set it to UTF-8 encoding  ....I'm planning to save some unicode string in this column.

  the column has data type nvarchar

  Question :  How do I set  UTF-8 encoding  to a column of a table in MS SQL Server 2008 ?

  Is there any script ?

• Eirikur Eiriksson

  SSC Guru

  Points: 182947

  More actions

  June 22, 2017 at 6:56 am

  #1947733

  spectra - Thursday, June 22, 2017 5:50 AM

  How to change character encoding to a column ?

  when I run this :

  SELECT collation_name FROM sys.columns
  WHERE name = 'FILENAME'
  AND [object_id] = OBJECT_ID('dbo.ATTACHMENT');

  I get :  SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

  I want to set it to UTF-8 encoding  ....I'm planning to save some unicode string in this column.

  the column has data type nvarchar

  Question :  How do I set  UTF-8 encoding  to a column of a table in MS SQL Server 2008 ?

  Is there any script ?

  SQL Server 2008 does not support UTF-8 but you can store the data as VARBINARY
  

• spectra

  SSCarpal Tunnel

  Points: 4120

  More actions

  June 22, 2017 at 7:36 am

  #1947751

  Eirikur Eiriksson - Thursday, June 22, 2017 6:56 AM

  spectra - Thursday, June 22, 2017 5:50 AM

  How to change character encoding to a column ?

  when I run this :

  SELECT collation_name FROM sys.columns
  WHERE name = 'FILENAME'
  AND [object_id] = OBJECT_ID('dbo.ATTACHMENT');

  I get :  SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

  I want to set it to UTF-8 encoding  ....I'm planning to save some unicode string in this column.

  the column has data type nvarchar

  Question :  How do I set  UTF-8 encoding  to a column of a table in MS SQL Server 2008 ?

  Is there any script ?

  SQL Server 2008 does not support UTF-8 but you can store the data as VARBINARY
  

  okay .....in that case ...how  Unicode  string is saved and retrieved in SQL Server 2008 ?

• Eirikur Eiriksson

  SSC Guru

  Points: 182947

  More actions

  June 22, 2017 at 8:27 am

  #1947774

  spectra - Thursday, June 22, 2017 7:36 AM

  Eirikur Eiriksson - Thursday, June 22, 2017 6:56 AM

  spectra - Thursday, June 22, 2017 5:50 AM

  How to change character encoding to a column ?

  when I run this :

  SELECT collation_name FROM sys.columns
  WHERE name = 'FILENAME'
  AND [object_id] = OBJECT_ID('dbo.ATTACHMENT');

  I get :  SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

  I want to set it to UTF-8 encoding  ....I'm planning to save some unicode string in this column.

  the column has data type nvarchar

  Question :  How do I set  UTF-8 encoding  to a column of a table in MS SQL Server 2008 ?

  Is there any script ?

  SQL Server 2008 does not support UTF-8 but you can store the data as VARBINARY
  

  okay .....in that case ...how  Unicode  string is saved and retrieved in SQL Server 2008 ?

  SQL Server 2008 uses  UCS-2 internally which is a UTF-16 subset, use the nchar and nvarchar datatypes to store those values. This is normally not a problem unless the values needs to be in the UTF-8 binary format.