Be sure to take character conversion into account when developing applications for client sites.
A code page, also known as a character set, is a set of 256 uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. The printable characters of the first 128 values are the same for all character-set choices. The last 128 characters, sometimes referred to as extended characters, differ from set to set.
Note This section only discusses single-byte character set issues of the U.S., German, and French language versions of SQL Server. It does not discuss double-byte character set (DBCS) issues of the Japanese version of SQL Server.
The default for SQL Server 6.x is ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1 or ANSI), also known as code page 1252. The code page for SQL Server determines the types of characters that SQL Server recognizes in your database data and the results that SQL Server returns for queries that involve character comparisons.
In some cases, SQL Server's code page differs from the operating system's code page. Windows NT and Windows 95 operating systems have both an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) code page and an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) code page.
The ANSI and OEM code pages depend on the country settings. The following code page settings exist for Microsoft operating systems: