UTF-16 seems very likely to me in database fields that cleanly support Unicode. It's the native default (for decades) in SQL Server and Oracle. Up until very re

UTF-16 seems very likely to me in database fields that cleanly support Unicode. It's the native default (for decades) in SQL Server and Oracle. Up until very recently it was the only Unicode safe character format for MySQL (when a true 8-bit UTF-8 character type was finally added after decades of hacks with broken 7-bit encodings). Postgres is the only SQL database I'm aware of that has had clean UTF-8 support for as long of a time that UTF-16 has been recommended or defaulted in every other SQL database. Obviously there are a lot of databases out there with hacks using things like bad UTF-8 in unsafe column formats not designed for it, of course. But if you are working with a database like that, codepoint counting is possibly among your least worries.