What should you do?

This section contains facts and tips to consider regarding character data types and locale settings.

Make sure that you have correctly defined the locale and length semantics for your character string data types.

When designing your database tables, consider using CHAR(N) for fixed-length string data (such as codes) and VARCHAR(N) for variable-length string data, such as names, address and comments.

Use VARCHAR variables for VARCHAR columns, and CHAR variables for CHAR columns, to achieve portability across all kinds of database servers.

Note that with SQL Server, the column types can be NCHAR/NVARCHAR National Character types, to Unicode character types to be combined with CHAR/VARCHAR program variables. SQL Server 2019 surrports UTF-8 collation for CHAR/VARCHAR columns.

Avoid storing empty strings in VARCHAR columns, or make sure that your program is prepared to get nulls while the database stores empty strings.