What is the difference between varchar and nvarchar

VARCHAR is an abbreviation for variable-length character string. It's a string of text characters that can be as large as the page size for the database table holding the column in question. The size for a table page is 8,196 bytes, and no one row in a table can be more than 8,060 characters. This in turn limits the maximum size of a VARCHAR to 8,000 bytes.

The "N" in NVARCHAR means uNicode. Essentially, NVARCHAR is nothing more than a VARCHAR that supports two-byte characters. The most common use for this sort of thing is to store character data that is a mixture of English and non-English symbols — in my case, English and Japanese.

 

VARCHAR is stored as regular 8-bit data. But NVARCHAR strings are stored in the database as UTF-16 — 16 bits or two bytes per character

 

The difference is that nvarchar is used to store unicode data, which is used to store multilingual data in your database tables.

 

varchar: Variable-length, non-Unicode character data. The database collation determines which code page the data is stored using.

nvarchar: Variable-length Unicode character data. Dependent on the database collation for comparisons.

   

* nchar and nvarchar can store Unicode characters.

* char and varchar cannot store Unicode characters.

* char and nchar are fixed-length which will reserve storage space for number of characters you specify even if you don't use up all that space.

* varchar and nvarchar are variable-length which will only use up spaces for the characters you store. It will not reserve storage like char or nchar.

nchar and nvarchar will take up twice as much storage space, so it may be wise to use them only if you need Unicode support.

 

nchar(10) is a fixed-length Unicode string of length 10. nvarchar(10) is a variable-length Unicode string with a maximum length of 10. Typically, you would use the former if all data values are 10 characters and the latter if the lengths vary.

The main reason for preferring nvarchar over varchar would be internationalization (i.e. storing strings in other languages).