VARCHAR VERSUS NVARCHAR

Question

Difference between VARCHAR AND NVARCHAR

praveen khade · Answer

nvarchar is used to store unicode data which is used to store multilingual data in our database tables. Variable-length non-Unicode character data with length of n bytes. n must be a value from 1 through 8000. Storage size is the actual length in bytes of the data entered not n bytes. The data entered can be 0 characters in length. Use nchar when the sizes of the column data entries are probably going to be similar. Use nvarchar when the sizes of the column data entries are probably going to vary considerably.

Rahul Saxena · Answer

SQL Server provides both datatypes to store character information. For the most part the two datatypes are identical in how we would work with them within SQL Server or from an application. The difference is that nvarchar is used to store unicode data which is used to store multilingual data in our database tables. Other languages have an extended set of character codes that need to be saved and this datatype allows for this extension. If our database will not be storing multilingual data you should use the varchar datatype instead. The reason for this is that nvarchar takes twice as much space as varchar this is because of the need to store the extended character codes for other languages.