Question

I am preparing a new database server, where I will migrate data from a big, existing, multilingual database (mostly english/french/spanish text, rarely special characters from other languages for e.g. city names).
My question is: should it be accent sensitive?
Users would be happy if the search made no difference between cafe and café.
But as a DBA, I am worried: I have never seen a database not suffering from bad characters conversions at least once in a while. If I choose accent insensitive, how will I query the database and ask “give me all books where the title contains a special characters”?
If I have a way to do this, I would happily go for accent insensitive.

Answer 1

It should depend on your general usage.

This doesn’t preclude you changing it for a specific query

eg

declare @t1 table (word nvarchar(50) collate Latin1_General_CI_AI)
declare @t2 table (word nvarchar(50) collate Latin1_General_CI_AS)

insert @t1 values ('cafe'),('restaurant'), ('café')
insert @t2 select * from @t1

select * from @t1 where word like 'cafe' 
select * from @t1 where word like 'cafe' collate Latin1_General_CI_AS
select * from @t1 where word like 'café' 
select * from @t1 where word like 'café' collate Latin1_General_CI_AS

select * from @t2 where word like 'cafe' 
select * from @t2 where word like 'cafe' collate Latin1_General_CI_AI
select * from @t2 where word like 'café' 
select * from @t2 where word like 'café' collate Latin1_General_CI_AI