Converting Microsoft SQL Server collation to UTF 8 I've a Rails-Application, which reads data from a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Database. 

All umlauts are represented by a '?', so I checked the encoding of the database.  The encoding is 'Latin 1'.   When I try to change it, I have a big list of different collations, but UTF-8 is not listed.  The rails application communicates with the database using an ODBC DSN, could this be the source of the problem?

How can I change the database collation to UTF-8?
Encoding? Do you mean collation? The collation only affects things like equality tests, sort order, etc. They don't affect the allowed encodings for column values.

If you want to store unicode text, you should make sure your columns are among


NCHAR
NVARCHAR
NTEXT (2-byte characters)


rather than


CHAR
VARCHAR
TEXT (1-byte characters).