UTF-8 support is now in preview for Azure SQL Database, allowing more options to companies extending their businesses to a global scale, where the requirement of providing global multilingual databas...
Updated Jul 23, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
Ronen_Ariely Thank you for the very detailed information. I work for a global company with almost all internally developed applications using .Net or .Net core on Windows with Azure SQL Databases (compatibility levels range from 120 - 140). Some databases are accessed by users within one country, some by users within one region, and some by users worldwide. Most strings are stored as UNICODE (NVARCHAR). UTF8 (or possibly UTF16 for databases used primarily by users of East Asian languages) seems like it could reduce storage sizes for such strings, but we would need to change our application and TSQL code accordingly, and change the collation for our existing databases. All this seems like a massive undertaking, although I can see the advantages for new applications.
You mention in one of your slides that there are performance issues with UTF8 but don't explain what they are. Can you point me to an article that describes these issues?