A character set, also known as a code page, is a group of letters, digits, and symbols that make up the possible values for the Microsoft® SQL Server™ character-based data types char, varchar, and text. Each character set contains 256 values. The printable characters of the first 128 values are the same for all character sets. The last 128 characters, referred to as extended characters, differ from set to set. The extended characters often represent language-specific letters and symbols.
Important It is critical that you select the correct character set when you install SQL Server. To change character sets after installing SQL Server, you must rebuild the databases and reload the data.
These character sets are available.
| Code page | Description |
|---|---|
| 1252 | ISO character set |
| 850 | Multilingual |
| 437 | U.S. English |
| 874 | Thai |
| 932 | Japanese |
| 936 | Chinese (simplified) |
| 949 | Korean |
| 950 | Chinese (traditional) |
| 1250 | Central European |
| 1251 | Cyrillic |
| 1253 | Greek |
| 1254 | Turkish |
| 1255 | Hebrew |
| 1256 | Arabic |
| 1257 | Baltic |