UTF-8 support is now generally available for Azure SQL Database, allowing more options to companies extending their businesses to a global scale, where the requirements of providing global multilingual database applications and services is critical to meet customer demands and specific market regulations. The benefits of introducing UTF-8 support extends to scenarios where legacy applications require internationalization and use inline queries. Additionally, if your dataset uses primarily ASCII characters, significant storage savings may also be achieved as compared to UTF-16 data types.
Read our Unicode support including UTF-8 support