Some examples of coded fields that may be known to be ascii: order name, department code, business title, cost center, location id, preferred language, account type…
replyEnglish has plenty of Unicode — claiming otherwise is such a cliché…
replyUnicode is a requirement everywhere human language is used, from Earth to the Boöotes Void.
Just to be pedantic, those characters are in 'ANSI'/CP1252 and would be fine in a varchar on many systems.
replyNot that I disagree — Win32/C#/Java/etc have 16-bit characters, your entire system is already 'paying the price', so weird to get frugal here.
> Unicode is a requirement everywhere human language is used
replyStrange then how it was not a requirement for many, many years.
Also less awkward to make it right the first time, instead of explaining why someone can’t type their name or an emoji
replySpecifically not talking about a name field
replyI am talking about coded values, like Status = 'A', 'B' or 'C'
replyTaking double the space for this stuff is a waste of resources and nobody usually cares about extended characters here in English language systems at least they just want something more readable than integers when querying and debugging the data. End users will see longer descriptions joined from code tables or from app caches which can have unicode.
It's way better to just use a DBMS that supports enums. I know SQL server isn't one of those but I still don't store my coded values as strings.
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replyThose are all single byte characters in UTF-8.
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