UTF-8 support in MS SQL 2019
Before MS SQL 2019 storing some characters (e.g. ASCII) in MS SQL was limited. SQL Server supports Unicode characters in the form of nchar, nvarchar, and ntext data types that are using UTF-16 encoding. The penalty of this was that you need to pay the price for more storage and memory because you had to store all the data in Unicode (UTF-16), even when you needed only ASCII characters. UTF-8 database support allow application(s) internationalization without converting all strings to Unicode.