Question

I discovered(*) today that, depending on the server, my TSQL commands were case-sensitive, meaning that, when one table’s column is named tableId, the following instruction might not succeed:

SELECT TableId FROM myTable

Depending on the column’s collation. SQL_Latin1_blablabla seems not to be case-sensitive, when Latin1_blablabla is.

So my first question is WHY!!!

And the second one is: what is the quickest trick (sp?) to change all collations for all concerned columns in the database?

EDIT: to make things very clear:

SELECT tableId FROM myTable

Work on all servers while

SELECT TableId FROM myTable

Works only on the server with the SQL_Latin_blablabla collation. Notice the difference between the 2 strings. We are not talking here about data collation, but about the impact of this collation on the way we write code!

(*) I could use here some additional and specific word to qualify my state of mind after this ‘discovery’, but all of them are adult-rated …

Answer 1

Following on from marc_s

sys.objects, sys.columns etc store the column names and object names in the collation of the database. So, a binary collation means object names treated as binary…