What is the difference between varchar and nvarchar?

Question

Is it just that nvarchar supports multibyte characters? If that is the case, is there really any point, other than storage concerns, to using varchars

Answer 1

I had a look at the answers and many seem to recommend to use nvarchar over varchar, because space is not a problem anymore, so there is no harm in enabling Unicode for little extra storage. Well, this is not always true when you want to apply an index over your column. SQL Server has a limit of 900 bytes on the size of the field you can index. So if you have a varchar(900) you can still index it, but not varchar(901). With nvarchar, the number of characters is halved, so you can index up to nvarchar(450). So if you are confident you don't need nvarchar, I don't recommend using it.

In general, in databases, I recommend sticking to the size you need, because you can always expand. For example, a colleague at work once thought that there is no harm in using nvarchar(max) for a column, as we have no problem with storage at all. Later on, when we tried to apply an index over this column, SQL Server rejected this. If, however, he started with even varchar(5), we could have simply expanded it later to what we need without such a problem that will require us to do a field migration plan to fix this problem.