Question

We have a legacy database with some (older) columns using “SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS” and more recent changes have used “Latin1_General_CI_AS”.

This is a pain as joins need the additional COLLATE statement to work.

I’d like to bring everything up to “Latin1_General_CI_AS”. From what I can gather they are more or less identical collations and I won’t lose data during this process…

Does anyone know if this is the case?

Answer 1

There is more info on this MSDN forum:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqlgetstarted/thread/196b4586-1338-434d-ba8c-49fa3c9bdeeb/

Which states:

You should see little difference if the collation is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS or Latin1_General_CI_AS, but both have instances where they are faster or slower than the other.

Latin1_General_CI_AS :- Latin1-General, case-insensitive, accent-
sensitive, kanatype-insensitive, width-insensitive

SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS:- Latin1-General, case-insensitive,
accent-sensitive, kanatype-insensitive, width-insensitive for Unicode
Data, SQL Server Sort Order 52 on Code Page 1252 for non-Unicode Data

Therefore in my opinion you shouldn’t see a difference, especially if your data is only a-z0-9