8 ms·
I agree with your first point. I've seen this same issue crop up in several other ORMs. As to your second point. VARCHAR uses N + 2 bytes where as NVARCHAR use
by beart 7mo ago
I agree with your first point. I've seen this same issue crop up in several other ORMs.
As to your second point. VARCHAR uses N + 2 bytes where as NVARCHAR uses N*2 + 2 bytes for storage (at least on SQL Server). The vast majority of character fields in databases I've worked with do not need to store unicode values.
- _3u10 7mo agoGenerally if it stores user input it needs to support Unicode. That said UTF-8 is probably a way better choice than UTF-16/UCS-2
- SigmundA 7mo agoUTF-8 is a relatively new thing in MSSQL and had lots of issues initially, I agree it's better and should have been implemented in the product long ago. I have avoided it and have not followed if the issues are fully resolved, I would hope they are.
- kstrauser 7mo ago> UTF-8 is a relatively new thing in MSSQL and had lots of issues initially, I agree it's better and should have been implemented in the product long ago. Their insistence on making the rest of the world go along with their obsolete pet scheme would be annoying if I ever had to use their stuff for anything ever. UTF-8 was conceived in 1992, and here we are in 2026 with a reasonably popularly database still considering it the new thing.
- recursive 7mo agoIn 92 it was a conference talk. In 98 it was adopted by the IETF. Point probably stands though.
- swasheck 7mo agothe data types were introduced with SQL Server 7 (1998) so i’m not sure it’s accurate to state that it’s considered as the new thing.
- SigmundA 7mo agoUTF-8 was introduced in SQL Server 2019: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/what-s-new-in-sql-server-2019?view=sql-server-ver17#unicode-support https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/what-s-new-...
- swasheck 7mo agothanks. now i see the point that the poster was making.
- da_chicken 7mo agoI would be more critical of Microsoft choosing to support UCS-2/UTF-16 if Microsoft hadn't completed their implementation of Unicode support in the 90s and then been pretty consistent with it. Meanwhile Linux had a years long blowout in the early 2000s over switching to UTF-8 from Latin-1. And you can still encounter Linux programs that choke on UTF-8 text files or multi-byte characters 30 years later (`tr` being the one I can think of offhand). AFAIK, a shebang is still incompatible with a UTF-8 byte order mark. Yes, the UTF-8 BOM is both optional and unnecessary, but it's also explicitly allowed by the spec.
- downsplat 7mo agoIt's not really a Linux vs MS thing though. When Unicode first came out, it was 16-bit, so all the early adopters went with that. That includes Java, Windows, JavaScript, the ICU lintaries, LibreOffice and its predecessors, .NET, the C language (remember wchar_t?), and probably a few more. Utf8 turned out to be the better approach, and it's slowly taking over, but it was not only Linu/Unix that pushed it ahead, the entire networking world did, especially http. Props also to early perl for jumping straight to utf8. Still... Utf8's superiority was clear enough by 2005 or so, MS could and should have seen it by then instead of waiting until 2019 to add utf8 collations to its database. Funny to see Sql Server falling behind good old Mysql on such a basic feature.
- wvenable 7mo agoDatabase systems are inherently conservative -- once you add something you have to support it forever. Microsoft went hog wild on XML in the database and I haven't seen it used in over a decade now.
- Dwedit 7mo agoThe one place UTF-16 massively wins is text that would be two bytes as UTF-16, but three bytes as UTF-8. That's mainly Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc...
- wvenable 7mo ago> The vast majority of character fields in databases I've worked with do not need to store unicode values. This has not been my experience at all. Exactly the opposite, in fact. ASCII is dead.
- SigmundA 7mo agoVast majority of text fields I see are coded values that are perfectly fine using ascii, but I deal mostly with English language systems. Text fields that users can type into directly especially multiline tend to need unicode but they are far fewer.
- simonask 7mo agoEnglish has plenty of Unicode — claiming otherwise is such a cliché… Unicode is a requirement everywhere human language is used, from Earth to the Boöotes Void.
- NegativeLatency 7mo agoAlso less awkward to make it right the first time, instead of explaining why someone can’t type their name or an emoji
- SigmundA 7mo agoSpecifically not talking about a name field
- SigmundA 7mo agoI am talking about coded values, like Status = 'A', 'B' or 'C' Taking double the space for this stuff is a waste of resources and nobody usually cares about extended characters here in English language systems at least they just want something more readable than integers when querying and debugging the data. End users will see longer descriptions joined from code tables or from app caches which can have unicode.
- SigmundA 7mo agoTo complicate matters SQL Server can do Nvarchar compression, but they should have just done UTF-8 long ago: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/data-compression/unicode-compression-implementation?view=sql-server-ver17 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/d... Also UTF-8 is actually just a varchar collation so you don't use nvarchar with that, lol?