sql server data warehouse: how does ado.net SqlDataReader.GetString() know which encoding to read the
data into a string as? Does sql sever set this at the column data type
level, server wide encoding setting, os encoding?

This is a question you can write volumes about. In a nutshell, SQL Server's
encoding scheme is UCS-2, regardless of the encoding of the data. It is the
client's responsibility to convert the data to UCS-2. In most cases, this
should be transparent, but depends on the correct codepage configuration of
the application and the web pages. Maybe it makes you feel better to know
that with Java and Oracle, there is a lot more that can go wrong.

Christian Donner
sqlservant.com


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