How to set Unicode for fields?

[unformatt]

I'm looking to store Unicode, not just latin-1 which seems to be Microsoft's favorite charset.

my config

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
       'ENGINE': "sql_server.pyodbc",
       'USER': None,
       'PASSWORD': None,
       'NAME': None,
       'AUTOCOMMIT': True, 
       'OPTIONS': {
          'dsn': None,
          'autocommit': True, 
          'extra_params': 'tds_version=7.3', 
          'driver_charset': 'utf-8',
          'collation': 'utf-8',
          'unicode_results': False 
        }
    }
}

My field

label = models.CharField(db_column='Label', max_length=250, blank=True, null=True)

I run migrations to create DB table and this SQL is executed:

CREATE TABLE XXX ([id] int IDENTITY (1, 1) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, [Label] nvarchar(250) NULL;

DB shows "Label" collation as SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

So if I insert Unicode into "Label" column, it appears to be blank. And for constrast, If I change driver_charset and collation to "iso-8859-1", then I get this when inserting unicode into "Label" column:

  File "site-packages/sql_server/pyodbc/base.py", line 513, in format_params
    fp.append(smart_str(p, self.driver_charset))
  File "site-packages/django/utils/encoding.py", line 109, in smart_bytes
    return force_bytes(s, encoding, strings_only, errors)
  File "site-packages/django/utils/encoding.py", line 146, in force_bytes
    return s.encode(encoding, errors)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u2019' in position 8: ordinal not in range(256)

[FlipperPA]

Are you on Linux? If so, what version of the FreeTDS driver are you using? Python 2 or 3? Thanks.

[unformatt]

Yes, I'm on Ubuntu 14. FreeTDS conf says $Id: freetds.conf,v 1.12 2007/12/25 06:02:36 jklowden Exp and I'm using python 2.7

[FlipperPA]

Sorry, I should have been more clear. When you run tsql -C what version of FreeTDS does it tell you you are on? I'm guessing it'll most likely be 0.91 and 0.95.

[unformatt]

The program 'tsql' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install freetds-bin

[FlipperPA]

Do you have access to install it? We need to know what FreeTDS version you're running in order to know which TDS version to use in your configuration.

[FlipperPA]

Also, which package are you using to Django's odbc connection? Can you provide a link? django-pyodbc-azure is the one that has worked best for me, but the configs are slightly different for each.