German Language in SQL Server 2005 ?

hi all,

i need to know how to enable my database that is stored onSQLServer 2005 to be able to storeGerman characters, because as you know that when it finds a unique character that is not supported by theCollationlanguage it puts instead a "?" character.

so i need to know the correctCollation item that is equivelant to the German language or if there is any extra download or package i should get to make it work.

Thank you very much.

Simply using NVARCHAR/NTEXT to store Unicode characters. And when inserting the Unicode string, you can put a N in front of the string:

insert into mytable (name) values(N'吕布')

The collation 'Latin1_General' should be the right one for German. You can use both Window Collations and SQL Collations in SQL Server. And you may also need to specify some extra attributes such asComparisonStyle for the collation. To understand how character data is stored, please refers to 'Collations', 'SQL Collation Name' and 'Window Collation Name' topic in SQL2000 Books Online. Below is from SQL2000 BOL:

Code pages define bit patterns for uppercase and lowercase characters, digits, symbols, and special characters such as !, @., #, or %. Each European language, such as German or Spanish, has its own single-byte code page. Although the bit patterns used to represent the Latin alphabet characters A through Z are the same for all the code pages, the bit patterns used to represent accented characters such as 'é' and 'á' vary from one code page to the next. If data is exchanged between computers running different code pages, all character data must be converted from the code page of the sending computer to the code page of the receiving computer.