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Accepted
simon
Asked: 2011-07-30 10:54:26 +0800 CST

get sql server 2005 to NOT use unicode in its TDS protocol?

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This may be a really stupid question, but...

The TDS protocol used by sql server appears to use unicode or UTF-16 character encoding. A query like select foo from bar appears like s.e.l.e.c.t. .f.o.o. .f.r.o.m. .b.a.r in the tcp stream in wireshark.

If you have an application connecting to SQL server over a network, that absolutely does not and probably never will use unicode text fields, is there a way to tell the sql client to encode the queries in ascii to cut network traffic?

sql-server-2005

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The tabular data stream (TDS) protocol documentation specifically states that SQL statements in the protocol will be encoded in Unicode (section 2.2). Unless you're running over a heavily bandwidth-constrained network you're probably just gold-plating to worry about this. (If you are bandwidth-constrained to the point that this is a problem you might want to consider tunneling the traffic over something with compression.)

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  2. I have just found this which seems to do some sort of compression on sql server tds traffic:

    http://www.nitrosphere.net/store/nitroaccelerator

    My initial test have shown that it works very well but it is quite expensive.

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