Is it safe to convert varchar and char into nvarchar and nchar in SQL Server?

Posted by Svish on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Svish
Published on 2009-08-05T10:43:58Z Indexed on 2010/04/02 2:33 UTC
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Filed under:

sql-server

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datatypes

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c#

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linq-to-sql

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unicode

We currently have a number of columns in the database which are of type varchar. The application that uses them are in C# and it uses Linq2Sql for the communication (or what to call it).

We would like to support unicode characters, which means we would have to convert the varchar columns into nvarchar. Is this a safe operation? Is it just a matter of changing the column type and updating the dbml file, or are there more stuff that needs to be done? Any changes in the C# code? Do I need to somehow convert the text that already exist in the database manually, or is it handled for me?

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