There is a performance cost associated with character set translation. If you can set up an environment for which no character set translation is required, you need not consider this cost, and your setup is simpler to maintain.
If you work with a single-byte character set and are concerned only with seven-bit ASCII characters (values 1 through 127), then you do not need character set translation. Even if the code pages differ between the database and the client operating system, they are compatible over this range of characters. Many English-language installations meet these requirements. Character set translation is turned on by default.
Even if you do require extended characters,
| Language | Character set |
|---|---|
| English | cp1252 |
| French | cp1252 |
| German | cp1252 |
| Japanese | cp932 (Shift-JIS) |
Character set translation is disabled if you specify CharSet=none in the connection string.