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I can't find option(s) directly to set UTF-8 rellated Collations/Charsets in SQL Server 2005/2008, same as is possible to set in another SQL engines, but in SQL Server 2005/2008 are there only Latin and SQL collations.

Is there some option to force/install these collations / charsets in SQL Server engine (for both ver.) 2005/2008 on Win2008 OS

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up vote 10 down vote accepted

No, there isn't. SQL Server doesn't support UTF-8.

You need to define your columns as nvarchar/nchar if you want unicode data. Note, internally SQL Server stores this as UCS-2.

Note that this has ben requested from MS on Connect and there is an older KB article. And some info on this blog too

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additionally, if you're going to be doing any text matching on an nvarchar with foreign characters, you need to match on a string formatted with an N before the string (e.g. N'οἰκονόμον'). –  zlatan Mar 9 '12 at 17:31
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