Unicode And Non-Unicode

Unicode : 

A Unicode character takes more bytes to store the data in the database. As we all know, many global industries want to increase their business worldwide and grow at the same time, they would want to widen their business by providing services to the customers worldwide by supporting different languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic. Many websites these days are supporting international languages to do their business and to attract more and more customers and that makes life easier for both parties.

Non-Unicode :

Non Unicode is exactly the opposite of Unicode. Using non-Unicode it is easy to store languages like ‘English’ but not other Asian languages that need more bits to store correctly otherwise truncation will occur.

Now, let’s see some of the advantages of not storing the data in the Unicode format:

1. It takes less space to store the data in the database hence we will save a lot of hard disk space. 
2. Moving database files from one server to another takes less time. 

What’s the difference between a Unicode and non-Unicode Tools install?

SOLUTION:
If UNICODE_ENABLED=1 on the PSSTATUS table, then you definitely have a Unicode installation. If UNICODE_ENABLED=0, then you do NOT have a Unicode installation.

Non-Unicode	Unicode
(char, varchar, text)	(nchar, nvarchar, ntext)
Stores data in fixed or variable length	Same as non-Unicode
char: data is padded with blanks to fill the field size. For example, if a char(10) field contains 5 characters the system will pad it with 5 blanks	nchar: same as char
varchar: stores actual value and does not pad with blanks	nvarchar: same as varchar
requires 1 byte of storage	requires 2 bytes of storage
char and varchar: can store up to 8000 characters	nchar and nvarchar: can store up to 4000 characters
Best suited for the US English: "One problem with data types that use 1 byte to encode each character is that the data type can only represent 256 different characters. This forces multiple encoding specifications (or code pages) for different alphabets such as European alphabets, which are relatively small. It is also impossible to handle systems such as the Japanese Kanji or Korean Hangul alphabets that have thousands of characters."1	Best suited for systems that need to support at least one foreign language: "The Unicode specification defines a single encoding scheme for most characters widely used in businesses around the world. All computers consistently translate the bit patterns in Unicode data into characters using the single Unicode specification. This ensures that the same bit pattern is always converted to the same character on all computers. Data can be freely transferred from one database or computer to another without concern that the receiving system will translate the bit patterns into characters incorrectly.