title: Convert web-based CMS to support utf-8
body: <p>I have to support an outdated CMS, which has some parts written in ASP, some in PHP and uses SQL Server for back end. Virtually anything in that system is written with two supported input languages in mind- Latvian and English. Therefore, it uses windows-1257 encoding in all web pages, that use that CMS, and also all admin pages. In database, the default collation is Latvian_CI_AS.</p>
  
  <p>Now the owner of the system wants to support also Russian language, and IMO the best way to go is to convert everything to utf-8.</p>
  
  <p>The big question is- how to convert everything which is stored in database to utf-8?
  My background is MySQL and I'm by no means proficient in SQL Server, so I don't know how to change the collation for the whole database. Do I have to fetch all the data from database, convert with iconv to utf-8, and push that data back in database?</p>
  
  <p>I understand I would have to change the encoding for all client web pages and scripts, but the main concern for me is the database.</p>