SQL Server default character encoding

Question

By default - what is the character encoding set for a database in Microsoft SQL Server?

How can I see the current character encoding in SQL Server?

Answer 1

I think this is worthy of a separate answer: although internally unicode data is stored as UTF-16 in Sql Server this is the Little Endian flavour, so if you're calling the database from an external system, you probably need to specify UTF-16LE.