How to change character set to UTF8 in visual basic express 2013? - sql

I am writing a clinic program using visual basic express 2013, I wrote the whole program then I noticed that when inserting patients in Arabic language my sql database showing ??????? in every field, people told me I have to change my database character set to UTF8 but I don't know how, any solution would be great.
note: I tried changing table definition with collate Arabic but no luck.
thanks in advance

In .net all strings are in Unicode which supports all character sets. What I would guess is missing is to set your table columns to nvarchar.
Regards
Av

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When I copied Vétéran to Word, it remained the same. I saved the Word doc as plain text using Windows default encoding (Western Europe), it is changed to Vétéran.
I cannot find a way to display it correctly in SMS. The data is copied from Oracle 12. It is displayed as Vétéran by Oracle SQL Developer.
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I tried different case and accent setting in collate. Does not work.

Not able to display Chinese character in application

I have a column in which Chinese characters are stored and the column contains a customer name in Chinese language.
When I select the column in SSMS I can see all the names in Chinese language but when the same is done from application the application displays '??????' in all the fields of that columns.
I tried to collate the column with 'Chinese_Simplified_Pinyin_100_CI_AS' in a select statement still no use.
Does anyone knows what should I do to display Chinese character in the application.
This issue due to application problem. its not an sql server issue. check in application. if ?????? comes in sql server, then only its sql server issue. hence its not an sql server issue

Encoding in Oracle database

I have a problem when inserting values into my Oracle database. I have to insert French characters like à or è and when I try to insert them through an INSERT statement it will convert the character to ¿ or ?.
Is there any possibility to set the encoding of that specific script, or what can I do in this situation ?
Thank you
Usually you would set the character set when you install your database. You can, however, change it post-setup if required (Look up CSALTER). If your database needs to support multiple languages, then you should take a look at this: Supporting Multilingual Databases with Unicode
I have fixed this problem by adding an Environment Variable called NLS_LANG with the value .AL32UTF8 . This worked even though the database has as language American and territory America. The problem that I have faced here was that once I changed the NLS_LANG variable, it started to encode my characters also in the application.
Also you can try to change the encoding of the script that you are running. For example I have used ANSI encoding (you can do it by opening a script in notepad++ and from the Encoding menu, select Convert to ANSI) and it worked properly.
Thank you guys for your help :)

Japanese character are saved as question mark in SQL Server

I'm working on SQL Server 2005, in which I have a database. When I use Japanese Characters in my application, they are stored as question marks in the databse. I would like to which Collations should I use save the japanese characters properly.
Note: Additional info(if it helps) In MySQL, we have used UTF8 as default character set in the startup variable and it works file.
Thank you,
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Japanese_90 appears to be the new collation name.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb330962%28v=sql.90%29.aspx#intlftrql2005_topic24
Note, you might want to consider the _KS suffix if you want to consider Hirigana/Katakana whilst sorting.
Like Marc_S says, you will also want to ensure your column datatype is nvarchar

SQL Server database with Latin1 codepage shows Japanese Chars as "?"

Three questions with the following scenario:
SQL Server 2005 production db with a Latin1 codepage and showing "?" for invalid chars in Management Studio.
SomeCompanyApp client as a service that populates the data from servers and workstations.
SomeCompanyApp management console that shows "?" for Asian characters.
Since this is a prod db I will not write to it.
I don't know if the client app that is storing the data in the database is actually storing it correctly as Unicode and it simply doesn't show because they are using Latin1 for the console.
Q1: As I understand it, SQL Server stores nvarchar text as Unicode regardless of the codepage or am I completely wrong and if the codepage is Latin1 then everything that is not in that codepage gets converted to "?".
Q2: Is it the same with a text column?
Q3: Is there a way using SQL Server Management Studio or Visual Studio and some code (don't care which language :)) to query the db and show me if the chars really do show up as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.?
My final goal is to extract data from the db and store it in another db using UTF-8 to show Japanese and other Asian chars as what they are in my own client webapp. I will settle for an answer to Q3. I can code in several languages and at the very least understand some others but I'm just not knowledgeable enough about Unicode. In case you want to know my webapp will be using pyodbc and cassandra but for these questions that doesn't matter.
When inserting into an NVARCHAR column in SSMS, you need to make absolutely sure you're prefixing your string with a N:
This will NOT work:
INSERT INTO dbo.MyTable(NVarcharColumn) VALUES('Some Text with Special Char')
SQL Server will interpret your string in the VALUES(..) as VARCHAR and thus strip off any special characters.
You need this:
INSERT INTO dbo.MyTable(NVarcharColumn) VALUES(N'Some Text with Special Char')
Prefixing your text literal with an N'..' tells SQL Server to treat this as NVARCHAR all the way.
Does this help you solve your Q3 ??