Encoding for non latin character giving question mark (?????) in Azure SQL

Question

Hi All,

I am ingesting data to Azure SQL. For those record non-latin character giving a question mark (?????) in the database. It's like Chinese, Japanese and Rusia character.

Is there anyway that we can get the original character instead of question mark (?????)? Is this related to collation setting?

Thank you and appreciate your help.

Answer 1

Make sure that the columns that will contain non-Latin characters are of the data type NVARCHAR, NCHAR, or NTEXT. While inserting data with non-Latin characters using a SQL query, make sure to prefix string literals with a N to denote that it's a Unicode string.

INSERT INTO YourTable (ColumnName) VALUES (N'............');

You can consider setting the collation of your database or column to a Unicode-aware one,

To check the collation of your database:

SELECT DATABASEPROPERTYEX('YourDatabaseName', 'Collation') AS Collation;

SELECT DATABASEPROPERTYEX('YourDatabaseName', 'Collation') AS Collation;

Or to set a specific collation for a column:

ALTER TABLE YourTable
ALTER COLUMN YourColumn NVARCHAR(255) COLLATE Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_SC_UTF8;