Microsoft SQL Server collation names?

A good description of width sensitivity is summarized here: databasejournal.com/features/mssql/artic....

A good description of width sensitivity is summarized here: databasejournal.com/features/mssql/artic... Width sensitivity When a single-byte character (half-width) and the same character when represented as a double-byte character (full-width) are treated differently then it is width sensitive. Perhaps from an English character perspective, I would theorize that a width-sensitive collation would mean that 'abc' N'abc', because one string is a Unicode string (2 bytes per character), whereas the other one byte per character. From a Latin characterset perspective it seems like something that wouldn't make sense to set.

Perhaps in other languages this is important. I try to set these types of collation properties to insensitive in general in order to avoid weird things like records not getting returned in search results. I usually keep accents set to insensitive, since that can cause a lot of user search headaches, depending on the audience of your applications.

Edit: After creating a test database with the Latin1_General_CS_AS_WS collation, I found that the N'a' = N'A' is actually true. Test queries were: select case when 'a' = 'A' then 'yes' else 'no' end select case when 'a' = 'a' then 'yes' else 'no' end select case when N'a' = 'a' then 'yes' else 'no' end So in practice I'm not sure where this type of rule comes into play.

– Martin Smith Feb 16 at 19:43 Thank you for the quick answer! As I use Unicode all the way (apps and SQL tables), I don't think I have to care about width sensitivity. – Jörgen Sigvardsson Feb 16 at 19:55.

The accepted answer demonstrates that it does not come into play for the comparison N'a' = 'a'. This is easily explained because the char will get implicitly converted to nchar in the comparison between the two anyway so both strings in the comparison are Unicode. I just thought of an example of a place where width sensitivity might be expected to come into play in a Latin Collation only to discover that it appeared to make no difference at all there either... DECLARE @T TABLE ( a VARCHAR(2) COLLATE Latin1_General_100_CS_AS_WS, be VARCHAR(2) COLLATE Latin1_General_100_CS_AS_WS ) INSERT INTO @T VALUES (N'Æ', N'AE'); SELECT LEN(a) AS LEN(a), LEN(b) AS LEN(b), a, b, CASE WHEN a = be THEN 'Y' ELSE 'N' END AS a=b FROM @T LEN(a) LEN(b) a be a=b ----------- ----------- ---- ---- ---- 1 2 Æ AE Y The Book "Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Internals" has this to say.

Width Sensitivity refers to East Asian languages for which there exists both half-width and full-width forms of some characters. There is absolutely nothing stopping you storing these characters in a collation such as Latin1_General_100_CS_AS_WS as long as the column has a unicode data type so I guess that the WS part would only apply in that particular situation.

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