We need to store much UTF-8 collated data in XML data type columns and the XML files we store explicitly state encoding='UTF-8', which results in an error when trying to store XML data in the column.
We are now in the process of switching DB collation default to Latin1_General_100_CI_AI_SC_UTF8 from a prior UTF-16 based Latin1_General_100_CI_AI_SC. Do we need to switch all nvarchar columns to varchar in the process? We are not afraid of losing any data and we (probably) do not have anything but a few encoded chars in our data, we are all in 'latin' alphabet. Is it simply going to affect (use 2x size)? Will there be a performance hit on joins? Any other consequences?