Question

My CUSTOMER table has some characters that are causing a downstream XML process to bark. It appears to be where LAST_NAME has a two-byte character. I’ve reviewed this SQL Server question which explained collation. But I’m still stuck. I notice that some characters are 2-bytes. I’m using AL32UTF8 and UTF8 character sets.

How can I find the last_names with 2 byte characters?
Is that the question I should be asking if I want find all 2-bytes characters regardless of the collation?

Answer 1

for the basic check of bytes != characters you can do something like

select * 
  from customer
 where length(last_name) != lengthb(last_name); 

but as NullUserException stated, depends how you really want to define special characters.