Collation Dialog Box

  • Article

Lets you specify a collation sequence for the column. A column's collation sequence is used in any operation that compares values of the column to another column or to constant values. It also affects the behavior of some string functions, such a SUBSTRING and CHARINDEX. For a complete list of the effects of a column's collation setting, see the SQL Server documentation.

Note

This dialog box is only available when you are working with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or later.

This dialog box appears in any of several situations:

  • If you enter an invalid collation name in the Collation field in the Column Properties tab.

  • If you click in the Collation field in the Column Properties tab, then click the ellipses (…) to the right of the field.

Note

The dialog boxes and menu commands you see might differ from those described in Help depending on your active settings or edition. To change your settings, choose Import and Export Settings on the Tools menu. For more information, see Visual Studio Settings.

  • SQL Collation
    Select SQL Collation if you want to choose among the collation sequences defined by Microsoft SQL Server. Then select a collation sequence from the drop-down list.

  • Windows Collation
    Select Windows Collation if you want to choose among the collation sequences defined by Windows. Then select a collation sequence from the drop-down list.

  • Binary Sort
    Applies only if you select Windows collation. Select this if you want comparison operations to use the binary codes of character values for comparison. If you select this option, certain alphabetic comparison options become unavailable. For example, making case-insensitive comparisons becomes unavailable because uppercase letters and lowercase letters have different binary encodings.

  • Dictionary Sort
    Applies only if you select Windows collation. Select this if you want comparison operations to use certain alphabetic comparison options. The alphabetic comparisons options are:

    • Case Sensitive   Select this if you want comparisons to consider uppercase and lowercase letters to be unequal.

    • Accent Sensitive   Select this if you want comparisons to consider accented and unaccented letters to be unequal. If you select this, comparisons will also consider differently accented letters to be unequal.

    • Kana Sensitive   Select this if you want comparisons to consider katakana and hiragana Japanese syllables to be unequal.

    • Width Sensitive   Select this if you want comparisons to consider half-width and full-width characters to be unequal.

  • Restore Default Button
    Applies to the column the default collation sequence for the database.

See Also

Concepts

Working with Columns in Aggregate Queries

Other Resources

Working with Columns

Working with Tables in Table Designer