Some Things You May Want to Know About Collations

Collations is a topic that tends to confuse SQL Server professionals. It is not that the implementation of collations in SQL Server is extremely confusing, but computer people are not always prepared for the surprises that human language can offer. For instance, did you know that V and W could be considered equal? Or that i and I could be different in a case-insensitive comparison? In this light-minded presentation I cover what a collation controls and I give a brief introduction to Unicode and other character sets, before I dissect a collation name like Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_KS_WS_SC_UTF8 to explain what all those components mean, including the new UTF-8 collations added in SQL 2019. I also cover two areas where collations induce some pain: metadata and collation conflicts.