You’re building a new table or adding a column, and you wanna know which datatype to use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?
If you need to store Unicode data, the choice is made for you: NVARCHAR says it’s gonna be me.
But if you’re not sure, maybe you think, “I should use VARCHAR because it takes half the storage space.” I know I certainly felt that way, but a ton of commenters called me out on it when I posted an Office Hours answer about how I default to VARCHAR. One developer after another told me I was wrong, and that in 2025, it’s time to default to NVARCHAR instead. Let’s run an experiment!
This is going back a long way (June of 2020) but one of my earliest YouTube videos is entitled NVARCHAR Everywhere. I’ve gotten a lot better at presentation skill since then (and have a much nicer camera), but I still stand by the arguments.