Ya, or for Oracle you might be better off using VARCHAR2, which uses UTF-8. That way you aren't mired in savagery, but don't have to pay the performance hit of storing 2 bytes per character for text that's mostly in western European languages. Whereas SQL Server users are stuck choosing between doubling up on I/O and suffering codepages. Meanwhile in PostgreSQL you just use regular VARCHAR and pick utf8 as your character set like a proper subgenius.

Fun fact: In earlier versions of Portal, it was database portability that GlaDOS promised to give you after the experiment.