varchar and nvarchar in SQL Server

VARCHAR

• VARCHAR is an abbreviation for variable-length character string.
• VARCHAR is stored as regular 8-bit data.
• Varchar (MAX) can hold max of 2,147,483,648 characters

NVARCHAR

• The "N" in NVARCHAR means uNicode.
• NVARCHAR strings are stored in the database as UTF-16 — 16 bits or two bytes per character
• NVARCHARs use two bytes for each character, that means a given NVARCHAR can only hold 4,000 characters (not bytes) maximum.
• NVARCHAR (MAX) can hold 1,073,741,823 characters
• The size for a table page is 8,196 bytes, and no one row in a table can be more than 8,060 characters.

• The difference is that nvarchar is used to store unicode data, which is used to store multilingual data in your database tables.