Summary

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is a powerful technology for supporting international operations and environments. At the heart of its multilingual features is the Unicode support available in SQL Server 2000. Through data types, SQL Server can store international, language-specific characters and support different clients that are running various character encodings at the same time.

Non-Unicode text is stored in the char, varchar,and text data types.Unicode data is stored in the nchar, nvarchar, and ntext data types in SQL Server 7 and SQL 2000. The datetime and smalldatetime data types represent various date and time values.

In addition to data types, collation is another important component in sorting and comparing multilingual data, whether Unicode or non-Unicode. In SQL Server 2000, a single, consistent model was designed to handle both Unicode and non-Unicode sorts. There are 40 languages that support 17 collation suffixes, producing a total of 680 Windows collations.

Among the guidelines that you should follow with SQL Server are to always use Unicode data types and to standardize the site collation where possible. You should also try to deploy a Unicode server and client if you can, consider storage space and performance, and delimit identifiers for objects in system tables.