"Why are we getting a ? in our SQL database in people's names?" Well a while back we came across this problem from one of our clients in the first name and last name fields in their client database. The problem was that we were using varchar (which only accepts regular English language type letters and symbols) and not nvarchar which accepts unicode characters such as â or é for other languages. I thought I'd help out people having the same problem and explain the difference between char, varchar, nchar and nvarchar here. More...