What size to use when moving from VARCHAR to NVARCHAR?

Question

I have a column in a table that is VARCHAR(64), I started seeing some strange characters which are obviously not storing correctly, for example:

Québec

I think I should change the column type to NVARCHAR(128) - but would like to get that validated by the Database community. From what I understand VARCHAR stores half the size as NVARCHAR, so I would need to double the VARCHAR(64) to NVARCHAR(128) - is that right? I think this question is basically: is Unicode twice as much space as ASCII?

Answer 1

NVARCHAR(64) holds 64 unicode characters, which takes up 128 bytes (but you don't need to know or care about that).

You specify size in characters, not bytes.