Overview

The ASCII character encoding standard is ASCII, which is based on 7-bit byte character strings and has enough characters to encode English text, but no other major written languages.

ISO has standardized several 8-bit extensions of ASCII for various groups of Latin-based writing systems. The ISO standard 8859 also has sections for Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Thai.

• Latin-1 supports Western European languages and is widely used.
• Latin-9 is adopted (with minor changes to Latin-1) to include the Euro sign (€).

char and varchar are treated as Latin-9 encoding. Latin-9 is replaced Latin-1 as the preferred 8-bit encoding for western European character data.

Latin-9 covers most Western European written languages such as French, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Portuguese, Italian, Albanian, Afrikaans, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Faroese, Icelandic, Irish, Scottish, English, but none of the central European languages like Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and others. Unicode is the problem-free way to handle written languages that are not in the Latin-9 list.