Collation

Question

Hey I recently came across the term collation dont know what this actually is. What do this term means could you clear ma basics on this topic. ?

Chintan Rathod · Answer

A collation encodes the rules governing the proper use of characters for either a language such as Greek or Polish or an alphabet. Each SQL Server collation specifies three properties: 1)The sort order to use for Unicode data types ( nchar  nvarchar  and ntext ). A sort order defines the sequence in which characters are sorted and the way characters are evaluated in comparison operations. 2)The sort order to use for non-Unicode character data types ( char  varchar  and text ). 3)The code page used to store non-Unicode character data. SQL Server 2000 collations can be specified at many levels. When you install an instance of SQL Server 2000 you specify the default collation for that instance. Each time you create a database you can specify the default collation used for the database. If you do not specify a collation the default collation for the database is the default collation for the instance. Whenever you define a character column you can specify its collation. If you do not specify a collation the column is created with the default collation of the database. Note: You cannot specify a collation for character variables and parameters; they are always created with the default collation of the database. A SQL Server collation defines how the database engine stores and operates on character and Unicode data. After data has been moved into an application however character sorts and comparisons done in the application are controlled by the Windows locale selected on the computer. SQL Server 2000 supports these code pages. Code page Description 1258 Vietnamese 1257 Baltic 1256 Arabic 1255 Hebrew 1254 Turkish 1253 Greek 1252 Latin1 (ANSI) 1251 Cyrillic 1250 Central European 950 Chinese (Traditional) 949 Korean 936 Chinese (Simplified) 932 Japanese 874 Thai 850 Multilingual (MS-DOS Latin1) 437 MS-DOS U.S. English Thank You.