Are all strings in Oxygene WideStrings?

When I read data from Sql Server and I have a column declared as VarChar, when I read it into a string, is it one byte per character?

What about when I read an NVarChar? Is that more than one character?

Or are Strings multi-byte characters all the time?

I’m asking because we switched some data from varchar to nvarchar and now a WCF deserialization seems to be taking twice as long.

yes. String in Oxygene always is UTF-16, on all platforms.