When should we use VARCHAR and when should we be using an NVARCHAR? Here are the few points that you have to take in consideration when designing a database column that uses one of the above.
- VARCHAR takes less amount of disk space to store than NVACHAR for the same string.
- VARCHAR does not support unicode data. So, if I try to save a string that is in any other language than English, it fails to display it as is.
- Thus NVARCHAR comes to our rescue in case we want to save unicode string variables/ literals.
- If we run the execution plan for select statements that have VARCHAR and NVARCHAR, we will notice that NVARCHAR takes more time to than VARCHAR