SQL Server default character encoding

The default character encoding for a SQL Server database is iso_1, which is ISO 8859-1. Note that the character encoding depends on the data type of a column. You can get an idea of what character encodings are used for the columns in a database as well as the collations using this SQL:

select data_type, character_set_catalog, character_set_schema, character_set_name, collation_catalog, collation_schema, collation_name, count(*) count
from information_schema.columns
group by data_type, character_set_catalog, character_set_schema, character_set_name, collation_catalog, collation_schema, collation_name;

If it's using the default, the character_set_name should be iso_1 for the char and varchar data types. Since nchar and nvarchar store Unicode data in UCS-2 format, the character_set_name for those data types is UNICODE.