SQL Server 2005/2008 UTF-8 Collation/Charset

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


You can't install UTF-8 as a character set because it's not a character set, it is an encoding.

If you want to store Unicode text you use the nvarchar data type.

If you want to store text encoded using UTF-8, you store it as binary data (varbinary).