varchar & nchar

Question

what is diff between varchar & nchar??

Vulpes · Answer

These definitions may not be the same in all RDBMS's but, in SQL Server, this is what they are (extracted from MSDN docs):
varchar [ ( n | max ) ]
Variable-length, non-Unicode string data. n defines the string length and can be a value from 1 through 8,000. max indicates that the maximum storage size is 2^31-1 bytes (2 GB). The storage size is the actual length of the data entered + 2 bytes.
nchar [ ( n ) ]
Fixed-length Unicode string data. n defines the string length and must be a value from 1 through 4,000. The storage size is two times n bytes. When the collation code page uses double-byte characters, the storage size is still n bytes. Depending on the string, the storage size of n bytes can be less than the value specified for n.