Is there a mechanism to check exactly which row may have characters that are not UTF8? I am trying with this kind of a command: select id from employee where modify_date between '2008-03-01' and '2008-07-01' and joint_field_of_name_etc <> convert(joint_field_of_name_etc, 'UTF8') This is of course not the best way of doing so. Is there a better system-provided way of checking for rows that may not be UTF8? Or to even have a constraint to this effect, to disallow any non-UTF8 data from getting in there? Thanks