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What is the difference between varchar and nvarchar in SQLite
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The key difference between varchar and nvarchar is the way they are stored, varchar is stored as regular 8-bit data(1 byte per character) and nvarchar stores data at 2 bytes per character. Due to this reason, nvarchar can hold upto 4000 characters and it takes double the space as SQL varchar.
Today's development platforms or their operating systems support the Unicode character set. Therefore, In SQL Server, you should utilize NVARCHAR rather than VARCHAR. If you do use VARCHAR when Unicode support is present, then an encoding inconsistency will arise while communicating with the database.
Each character of an nvarchar column requires 2 bytes of storage whereas a varchar column requires 1 byte per character. Potentially, varchar will be quicker but that may well mean that you cannot store the data that you need.
You can declare a VARCHAR(10) and SQLite will be happy to store a 500-million character string there. And it will keep all 500-million characters intact. Your content is never truncated. SQLite understands the column type of "VARCHAR(N)" to be the same as "TEXT", regardless of the value of N.
In Microsoft SQL Server, VARCHAR is ASCII and NVARCHAR is Unicode (UTF-16). In SQLite, all text is Unicode, so it's not relevant. In any case, SQLite is loosely typed so it wouldn't make a difference anyways. See http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html:)
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