Question

I need to change the collation of an nvarchar variable. By documentation:

(…)
3. The COLLATE clause can be specified
at several levels. These include the
following:

Casting the collation of an
expression. You can use the COLLATE
clause to apply a character expression
to a certain collation. Character
literals and variables are assigned
the default collation of the current
database. Column references are
assigned the definition collation of
the column. For the collation of an
expression, see Collation Precedence
(Transact-SQL).

However I can’t figure out the correct syntax for the usage of CAST(), CONVERT() or variable declaration with DECLARE for this purpose.

Answer 1

SELECT CAST('abc' AS varchar(5)) COLLATE French_CS_AS