Page History: Case and Accent Sensitivity in SQL Server

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Page Revision: Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 9:27 AM

Most instances of SQL server have been installed with the default collation, which is case-insensitive. This means that when comparing strings in a WHERE class, the case of letters is NOT considered. If case is important, you can use the following strategy.

Current Collation¶

select serverproperty('collation') as result

This statement will yield a single-row result set, containing something like 'SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS'.

• The CI means "case-insensitive"; CS would mean "case-sensitive".
• The AS means "accent-sensitive"; AI would mean "accent-insensitive".
  

Forcing Case-Sensitivity¶

select *
from dbo.Documents
where Contents collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS like '%Brown%'

Ignoring Accents¶

This is also known as "accent-insensitivity".

select *
from dbo.Restaurants
where Name collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI like 'Cafe'

This statement will return Restaurants rows where the name contains 'Cafe' or 'Café'.

With the REPLACE Function¶

SELECT REPLACE('Das ist ein Test'  COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN, 'Test', 'desk' );

Yields

Das ist ein desk