磁盘空间不是问题…但是记忆和性能会。 双倍的页面阅读量，双倍的索引大小，奇怪的LIKE和=恒定的行为等等

你需要存储中文等脚本吗?是或不是…

来自MS BOL的《Unicode的存储和性能影响》

编辑:

最近的SO问题强调了nvarchar性能有多差…

SQL Server在搜索nvarchar字符串时使用高CPU

在过去的几年里，我们所有的项目都使用了NVARCHAR，因为所有这些项目都是多语言的。从外部源导入的数据(例如ASCII文件等)在插入到数据库之前被上转换为Unicode。

我还没有遇到任何与较大索引相关的性能问题，等等。索引确实会使用更多的内存，但是内存很便宜。

无论您是使用存储过程还是动态构造SQL，都要确保所有字符串常量都有N前缀(例如SET @foo = N' hello world.';)，这样常量也是Unicode。这避免了在运行时进行任何字符串类型转换。

YMMV。

是一致的!加入一个VARCHAR到NVARCHAR有一个很大的性能打击。

Generally speaking; Start out with the most expensive datatype that has the least constraints. Put it in production. If performance starts to be an issue, find out what's actually being stored in those nvarchar columns. Is there any characters in there that wouldn't fit into varchar? If not, switch to varchar. Don't try to pre-optimize before you know where the pain is. My guess is that the choice between nvarchar/varchar is not what's going to slow down your application in the foreseable future. There will be other parts of the application where performance tuning will give you much more bang for the bucks.

由于您的应用程序很小，使用nvarchar与使用varchar相比，基本上没有明显的成本增加，而且如果您需要存储unicode数据，您也省去了潜在的麻烦。

For your application, nvarchar is fine because the database size is small. Saying "always use nvarchar" is a vast oversimplification. If you're not required to store things like Kanji or other crazy characters, use VARCHAR, it'll use a lot less space. My predecessor at my current job designed something using NVARCHAR when it wasn't needed. We recently switched it to VARCHAR and saved 15 GB on just that table (it was highly written to). Furthermore, if you then have an index on that table and you want to include that column or make a composite index, you've just made your index file size larger.

做决定时要考虑周全;在SQL开发和数据定义中，似乎很少有“默认答案”(当然，除了不惜一切代价避免游标)。