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by downsplat 111 days ago
Did this post come out of a freezer from 1998? Who on earth creates databases in Latin1 in 2026?

Nevermind, looks like Sql Server didn't add utf8 collations until 2019 (!) and for decades people had to choose column by column between the 16-bit overhead of "nvarchar" and latin1... And still do if they want a bit of backwards compatibility. Amazing.
1 comments
rmunn 111 days ago
"Just use Postgres" (which defaults to UTF-8 encoding unless specifically configured to use something else) is looking like better and better advice every day.

Doesn't help those tied to legacy systems that would require a huge, expensive effort to upgrade, though. Sorry, folks. There's a better system, you know it's a better system, and you can't use it because switching is too expensive? I've been there (not databases, in my case) and it truly sucks.

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