AdrianHu99
commented
6 years ago SQL Server differentiates its data types that support Unicode from the ones that just support ASCII. For example, the character data types that support Unicode are nchar, nvarchar, longnvarchar where as their ASCII counter parts are char, varchar and longvarchar respectively. By default, all Microsoft’s JDBC drivers send the strings in Unicode format to the SQL Server, irrespective of whether the datatype of the corresponding column defined in the SQL Server supports Unicode or not. In the case where the data types of the columns support Unicode, everything is smooth. But, in cases where the data types of the columns do not support Unicode, serious performance issues arise especially during data fetches. SQL Server tries to convert non-unicode datatypes in the table to unicode datatypes before doing the comparison. Moreover, if an index exists on the non-unicode column, it will be ignored. This would ultimately lead to a whole table scan during data fetch, thereby slowing down the search queries drastically.
http://emransharif.blogspot.com/2011/07/performance-issues-with-jdbc-drivers.html