International Considerations for Databases and Database Engine Applications

SQL Server supports the storage and manipulation of multilingual data throughout the SQL Server Database Engine. Features include Unicode data types and other special encodings, date and time data types, and collations for sorts and comparisons. 

In This Section

• Writing International Transact-SQL Statements
  Provides guidelines for making Transact-SQL statements more portable between languages, especially when performing operations with dates.

• Working with Unicode Data
  Explains the Unicode data types, the benefits of using Unicode, and how to program database applications that use Unicode.

• Working with Special Character Encodings
  Explains SQL Server support for supplementary characters and GB18030 characters.

• Using Date and Time Data
  Explains the time, date, smalldatetime, datetime, datetime2, and datetimeoffset data types for working with date and time data.

• Working with Collations
  Explains the types of collations in SQL Server, collation architecture, and how to work with collations.

See Also

Concepts

Best Practices for Choosing a Language When Creating a Full-Text Index