Microsoft did a comparison between UTF-8 and UTF-16 for Sql Server and found pretty much the same results. I can't find the more detailed article, but this sum

Microsoft did a comparison between UTF-8 and UTF-16 for Sql Server and found pretty much the same results. I can't find the more detailed article, but this summarizes it: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/sql-server-blog/introducing-utf-8-support-for-sql-server/ba-p/734928 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/sql-server-blog/intro... From what I can remember, UTF-8 consumes more CPU as it's more complex to process, has space savings for mostly ascii & European codepages, but can significantly bloat storage sizes for character sets that consistently require 3 or 4 bytes per character.