alt Hacker NewsI agree with your first point. I've seen this same issue crop up in several other ORMs.
As to your second point. VARCHAR uses N + 2 bytes where as NVARCHAR uses N*2 + 2 bytes for storage (at least on SQL Server). The vast majority of character fields in databases I've worked with do not need to store unicode values.
Replies
_3u10 • yesterday at 11:35 PM
Generally if it stores user input it needs to support Unicode. That said UTF-8 is probably a way better choice than UTF-16/UCS-2
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SigmundA • yesterday at 11:52 PM
To complicate matters SQL Server can do Nvarchar compression, but they should have just done UTF-8 long ago:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/d...
Also UTF-8 is actually just a varchar collation so you don't use nvarchar with that, lol?
> The vast majority of character fields in databases I've worked with do not need to store unicode values.
This has not been my experience at all. Exactly the opposite, in fact. ASCII is dead.