You must be familiar with how Unicode data is represented from a binary standpoint. For example, if a field is set with a size of x and x is not large enough to handle incoming double-byte data, the data may be truncated.

UTF-8 files often use a byte order mark (BOM) with leading bytes at the beginning of a data stream to distinguish between ASCII and Unicode data.

For instance, in a binary view of your data file, you may have extra bytes at the beginning of the file. These bytes are not necessary when handling typed data in databases and are removed during the transformation. Usually, a BOM wastes space and complicates string concatenation.