Question

Does anybody know what the WS property of a collation does? Does it have anything to do with Asian type of scripts? The MSDN docs explain it to be “Width Sensitive”, but that doesn’t make any sense for say Swedish, or English…?

Answer 1

A good description of width sensitivity is summarized here: http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.php/3302341/SQL-Server-and-Collation.htm

Width sensitivity

When a single-byte character
(half-width) and the same character
when represented as a double-byte
character (full-width) are treated
differently then it is width
sensitive.

Perhaps from an English character perspective, I would theorize that a width-sensitive collation would mean that ‘abc’ <> N’abc’, because one string is a Unicode string (2 bytes per character), whereas the other one byte per character.

From a Latin characterset perspective it seems like something that wouldn’t make sense to set. Perhaps in other languages this is important.

I try to set these types of collation properties to insensitive in general in order to avoid weird things like records not getting returned in search results. I usually keep accents set to insensitive, since that can cause a lot of user search headaches, depending on the audience of your applications.

Edit:
After creating a test database with the Latin1_General_CS_AS_WS collation, I found that the N’a’ = N’A’ is actually true. Test queries were:

select case when 'a' = 'A' then 'yes' else 'no' end
select case when 'a' = 'a' then 'yes' else 'no' end
select case when N'a' = 'a' then 'yes' else 'no' end 

So in practice I’m not sure where this type of rule comes into play