Ok, let me begin this by stating that I am not a DBA, so someone may correct me. I found out today that just because you use nvarchar or ntext or any other unicode field type in SQL Server, the data may not actually be stored in Unicode. If you do not prepend your SQL statements with N, the data isn't treated as Unicode. So, for example, to store string 'foo' as Unicode, you need to do N'foo'.

Now, this is news to me, and it seems a bit silly. If I specify column X as Unicode, why in the hell do I have to force the issue when I'm writing SQL?

I've actually never even seen that syntax before - has anyone else?