Question

I had this error and I don’t know how to fix it

Cannot resolve the collation conflict between “Arabic_CI_AS” and
“SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS” in the equal to operation.

note: I already change the collation from the database option –> Collation

I change it from “Arabic_CI_AS” to “SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS”

and I am still getting the same error !!
Any suggestion to solve this ?

Answer 1

The database collation applies only when you create NEW objects without specifying the collation.

When you change it from “Arabic_CI_AS” to “SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS”, all the textual columns in the database are still collated Arabic_CI_AS. You can check this using

select object_name(object_id), name, collation_name
from sys.columns
where collation_name like '%Arabic%'

A patch to this problem is to put COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT against the comparison, e.g.

SELECT *
FROM TBL1
INNER JOIN TBL2 on X = Y COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT

or

SELECT *
FROM TBL1
WHERE X = Y COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT

etc

There is a script on this site that attempts to change the collation across an entire database, but

1. I have not personally tried it
2. Make sure you have a good backup of your database before trying it
3. It doesn’t look like it will handle complex databases with indexed views, foreign key/default constraints etc