Question

I am trying to exract the following character as unicode from a sql server 2008 db

the character should be umlaut

Here is the schema information from the table

character_set_name    collation_name

iso_1                 SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

and here is my select statement

select 
    StudentName

from GenData.dbo.StudentInfo 
where StudentID = 105
order by studentname COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_Pref_CP850_CI_AS

However the above still produces:

ö

does anyone know what i am doing wrong or how to extract this character? your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

If you change the column from char or varchar to nvarchar it should resolve the issue going forward.

ALTER TABLE MyTable ALTER COLUMN MyField nvarchar(1234)

Be mindful of using nvarchar in sql queries.

  'this is varchar'
  N'but this is nvarchar'

As far as recovering the information already skewed, it is often a difficult process of trial and error from my experience. You could try inputting characters into varchar fields and using that information to scrub your data.

INSERT INTO #transpose
SELECT '' low, N'Ü' high
UPDATE #transpose SET low = high

Update MyTable 
SET MyFIELD = REPLACE(MyField, low, high) 
FROM MyTable 
CROSS JOIN #transpose