In today's world, the chances of having data in a single language are slim to none. Your customers speak and write many languages with many different letters. Once you get to talking or thinking about characters, collations, encodings, sort orders, diacritics, code pages, etc, a brain melt is what you end up with. In this session we'll look at what all of these things are, how they fit together and how to use them properly, as each of them can break your applications in various ways. Since SQL Server 2019 brought improvements in UTF-8 area, and we'll see how we can use that to our benefit. Because sometimes it's not enough to just use NChar or NVarChar and think everything will be ok.