Does converting a column from varchar to nvarchar change the encoding of the strings stored in the column?

Question

If I have a database containing only varchar columns, with strings encoded in Latin-1 (and collation set accordingly), will converting the columns to nvarchar using ALTER TABLE commands change the encoding of the column contents to unicode (UTF-16), or do I have to convert them myself?

Answer 1

Yes, encoding will be changed. You don't have to convert anything.