How to fix a collation conflict in a SQL Server query?

Question

I am working on a view, wherein I am using an inner join on two tables which are from two different servers. We are using linked server. When running the query I am getting this message:

Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS" and "Arabic_CI_AS" in the equal to operation.

I don't know much about collation. Searching through internet I find solutions to use COLLATE, but the concept of COLLATE is not clear to me. Will it change anything for any of the databases? I am looking for a solution without changing anything for the databases.

Any good learning material for these concepts is welcome.

Answer 1

You can resolve the issue by forcing the collation used in a query to be a particular collation, e.g. SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS or DATABASE_DEFAULT. For example:

SELECT MyColumn FROM FirstTable a INNER JOIN SecondTable b ON a.MyID COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS =  b.YourID COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS 

In the above query, a.MyID and b.YourID would be columns with a text-based data type. Using COLLATE will force the query to ignore the default collation on the database and instead use the provided collation, in this case SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS.

Basically what's going on here is that each database has its own collation which "provides sorting rules, case, and accent sensitivity properties for your data" (from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143726.aspx) and applies to columns with textual data types, e.g. VARCHAR, CHAR, NVARCHAR, etc. When two databases have differing collations, you cannot compare text columns with an operator like equals (=) without addressing the conflict between the two disparate collations.