determining the character set of a table / database?

Question

What T-SQL command can be run to find character set of a table or database in SQL Server?

edit: Server version: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (RTM) - 10.50.1600.1 (X6

Answer 1

The character set depends on the data type of a column. You can get an idea of what character sets are used for the columns in a database as well as the collations using this SQL:

select data_type, character_set_catalog, character_set_schema, character_set_name, collation_catalog, collation_schema, collation_name, count(*) count
from information_schema.columns
group by data_type, character_set_catalog, character_set_schema, character_set_name, collation_catalog, collation_schema, collation_name;

If it's using the default character set, the character_set_name should be iso_1 (ISO 8859-1) for the char and varchar data types. Since nchar and nvarchar store Unicode data in UCS-2 format, the character_set_name for those data types is UNICODE.