SQL Server multi language data support
collation, sql-server
Solution
You need to use nvarchar data type for strings ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186939.aspx ) and you also need to precede all unicode strings with N ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/239530 ).
When dealing with Unicode string constants in SQL Server you must precede all Unicode strings with a capital letter N, as documented in the SQL Server Books Online topic "Using Unicode Data". The "N" prefix stands for National Language in the SQL-92 standard, and must be uppercase. If you do not prefix a Unicode string constant with N, SQL Server will convert it to the non-Unicode code page of the current database before it uses the string.
Problem
How do you setup a SQL Server 2005 DBMS, so that you can store data in different languages? My exact problem is this: in SQL Server Management Studio I'm writing an insert statement which contains German Umlauts. Text is successfully saved but reading the same value results in text without Umlaut. Consider that I have to support 4 languages: English, German, Greek & Russian (I don't want to think what I will face with the Russian text). The DBMS is now setup with Greek collation (to support Greek). Does this cause any problem?? Any hints??