Collation Error 468

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Collation Error 468

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Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Posted Wednesday, October 10, 2007 11:29 PM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Collation Error 468

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Post #409344

James Stover

Posted Wednesday, October 10, 2007 11:41 PM

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"Most DBAs don't ever deal with multiple languages or different collation and sort order settings in SQL Server"

Now there's a sweeping statement. In fact, I would say many (if not all) non-USA DBA's have had to deal with this. Convert to SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS or die, Latin1_General_CI_AS scum!

James Stover, McDBA

Post #409348

DanKennedy

Posted Thursday, October 11, 2007 12:29 AM

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I've come across this one quite a bit at one contract I had as a third-party vendor insisted that the performance of a binary collation was much quicker than a case-insensitive one and so set the default to Latin1_General_Bin for everything.

I'm not sure if there are tests/stats to back this claim up but I do know that the majority of queries against the data were name related and so most of their queries were written as UPPER([NameColumn]) = UPPER(@Criteria). Brilliant !! Index seek to index scan in one easy step.

After seeing this I wasn't inclined to believe their performance enhancement claim.

Dan
www.firstcs.co.uk

Post #409352

Nebojsa Ilic

Posted Thursday, October 11, 2007 1:18 AM

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Good practice is to use same collation whenever it's possible. If you have databases with different collations on the same sever use COLLATION database_default in CREATE/ALTER TABLE statement to not confuse yourself. When import objects from other sources check collation of destination tables.

Post #409364

Richard Dragossy-168541

Posted Thursday, October 11, 2007 1:55 AM

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Hello Steve!

I've nearly the same problem with collation. I've had to build a "data warehouse" from four different different databases of four systems, one of them is multilingual.

The solution slightly differs only:

SELECT ...............
FROM [DB1].[dbo].[TABLE1] as T1
inner join [DB2].[dbo].[TABLE2] as T2
on T1.name SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
= T2.table_name SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

In this case both sides of join are forced to use the same collation Smile

I hadn't time to check the theoretical fundamentals or efficiency aspects, but in practice it's works.

Best regards: Richard

Post #409372

Carolyn Richardson

Posted Thursday, October 11, 2007 3:40 AM

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"Most DBAs don't ever deal with multiple languages or different collation and sort order settings in SQL Server"

The majority of UK DBA's will have come across collation issues, its a common problem for me. I currently have a server having 9 databases with various different collations at table and row level and am trying to clean up the mess.... To identify whether I had issues:-

USE MASTER
GO

SET NOCOUNT ON

DECLARE @DB VARCHAR (150),
@Counter INT,
@Rec VARCHAR (150),
@SQL VARCHAR (1000),
@SQL1 VARCHAR (1000),
@SQL2VARCHAR (1000)

SELECT database_id, name INTO #Temp
FROM sys.databases
WHERE name NOT IN ('Master', 'tempdb','msdb','model')

SET @Counter = (SELECT MIN(database_id) FROM #Temp)

/*Work out if a database has more than one collation, assumes only interested if more than one*/
CREATE TABLE #ctr
( NumRows int )

WHILE @Counter <= (SELECT MAX(database_id) FROM #Temp)
BEGIN

SET @DB = (SELECT name
FROM #Temp
WHERE database_id = @Counter)

--Alter 'Latin' below if not just comparing US/UK

SET @SQL = 'INSERT INTO #ctr SELECT count(distinct COLLATION_NAME)
FROM '+ @DB +'.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.columns
WHERE COLLATION_NAME LIKE ''%Latin%'' '
EXEC (@SQL)
SET @Rec = (SELECT NumRows FROM #ctr)
DELETE FROM #ctr

IF (@Rec > 1)
BEGIN
PRINT @DB
SET @SQL1 = 'SELECT TABLE_CATALOG AS [DATABASE], '
SET @SQL1 = @SQL1 +'TABLE_NAME, '
SET @SQL1 = @SQL1 +'COLLATION_NAME, '
SET @SQL1 = @SQL1 +'COLUMN_NAME, '
SET @SQL1 = @SQL1 +'DATA_TYPE '
SET @SQL1 = @SQL1 +'FROM '+ @DB +'.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.columns '
SET @SQL1 = @SQL1 +'WHERE TABLE_NAME <> ''dtproperties'' '
SET @SQL1 = @SQL1 +'AND COLLATION_NAME LIKE ''%Latin%'' '
SET @SQL1 = @SQL1 +'ORDER BY COLUMN_NAME'

EXEC (@SQL1)
END
SET @Counter = @Counter + 1
END

DROP TABLE #ctr
GO
DROP TABLE #Temp
GO

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable - Mark Twain
Carolyn
SQLServerSpecialists

Post #409410

Dean Hill

Posted Thursday, October 11, 2007 3:48 AM

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Hi, we've had similar problems with collations across different data sources, but have also found one bonus. As part of the validation for data imports we check for personal info being in upper case by using a case sensitive collation

--Does the data need to be proper cased
select 'Employee- ' +d.EMP_REF+ ' name- ' +d.SURNAME
from DOWNLOAD_Employee d
where substring(d.SURNAME, 2, 1) --get second character in SURNAME
<> lower(substring(d.SURNAME, 2, 1)) --get second character again and lowercase it
collate sql_latin1_general_cp1_cs_as --compare the two using a case-sensitive collation

Post #409414

Neil Evans-Mudie

Posted Thursday, October 11, 2007 4:01 AM

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Steve, nice article and a nice pointer ref to Tony Rogerson. I ran in to this issue also here in the UK after I restored a DB built on a UK locale server to a US locale-built server which itself had DBs created using default US-locale led collation. Tony's article help me fix the resultant mixed-collation issues (as I wanted to union results from several source DBs with differing collations).

Anyway one addition I wanted to mention was watch the collation on your Tempdb aswell as your User DBs, as it can affect your query results in a mixed collation DB environment. Here's a couple URLs:
Kimberley Tripp article titled 'Changing Database Collation and dealing with TempDB Objects'
@ http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/kimberly/PermaLink.aspx?guid=7b4c9796-66d0-4ed2-b19d-bef6bb1e3e1d#a7b4c9796-66d0-4ed2-b19d-bef6bb1e3e1d

Michael Kaplan's blog entry @ http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/05/30/610889.aspx

Hope this helps.

Cheers, Neil (DBA in UK)

Post #409418

chris webster

Posted Thursday, October 11, 2007 4:32 AM

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This problem is excaserbated by 'part-time' DBAs in the UK blindly installing SQL Server with defualts without referring to the regional settings of the server which influence the default collation of the sql server. The UK default is the Windows collation introduced with SQL 2000 which according to microsoft gives performance benifits as it matches that of the OS. I have no idea why the US defaults to a collation that was supposed to be only there for backwards compatability.

Post #409429

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Posted Thursday, October 11, 2007 6:08 AM

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Probably because we're lazy in the US. Stick with what was working, etc. ;)

I'm sure many of you in the UK and elsewhere deal with this, but I was going on the stats for this site. We're 80% US readership. So I used the "most".

Note that I didn't imply "best" Hehe

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Post #409458

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