When I first dove into the world of SQL, understanding the difference between varchar vs nvarchar was a bit of a puzzle. What clicked for me was realizing that nvarchar supports Unicode characters, meaning it can store things like emojis or scripts from multiple languages, whereas varchar only supports non-Unicode characters (think basic ASCII).
The major takeaway here, though, is the storage impact: nvarchar uses 2 bytes per character, so it can be a lot more memory-hungry. If you’re not working with multilingual content or special characters, sticking with varchar is definitely more efficient for storage and performance.