External file format support for UTF-16LE encoded files in SQL Data Warehouse
Published date: March 31, 2017
In Azure SQL Data Warehouse, external file formats can now support delimited text files that are encoded in UTF-16LE encoding. Support for UTF-16 encoded delimited text files means that you can load files that have been moved via BCP.exe. So you can worry less about the data encoding and more about the value that you can derive from the data in the file.
For more information, see the documentation on creating external file formats.