SQL Server case insensitive collation

Question

What are the benefits/drawbacks of using a case insensitive collation in SQL Server (in terms of query performance)?

I have a database that is currently using a case-insensitive collation, and I don't really like it. I would very much like to change it to case sensitive. What should I be aware of when changing the collation?

Answer 1

If you change the collation on the database, you also have to change it on each column individually - they maintain the collation setting that was in force when their table was created.

create database CollTest COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AI
go
use CollTest
go
create table T1 (
    ID int not null,
    Val1 varchar(50) not null
)
go
select name,collation_name from sys.columns where name='Val1'
go
alter database CollTest COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS
go
select name,collation_name from sys.columns where name='Val1'
go

Result:

name collation_name
---- --------------
Val1 Latin1_General_CI_AI

name collation_name
---- --------------
Val1 Latin1_General_CI_AI

Answer 2

I would say the biggest drawback to changing to a case sensitive collation in a production database would be that many, if not most, of your queries would fail because they are currently designed to ignore case.

I've not tried to change collation on an existing datbase, but I suspect it could be quite time consuming to do as well. You probably will have to lock your users out completely while the process happens too. Do not try this unless you have thoroughly tested on dev.

Answer 3

(I added this as a separate answer because its substantially different than my first.) Ok, found some actual documentation. This MS KB article says that there are performance differences between different collations, but not where you think. The difference is between SQL collations (backward compatible, but not unicode aware) and Windows collations (unicode aware):

Generally, the degree of performance difference between the Windows and the SQL collations will not be significant. The difference only appears if a workload is CPU-bound, rather than being constrained by I/O or by network speed, and most of this CPU burden is caused by the overhead of string manipulation or comparisons performed in SQL Server.

Both SQL and Windows collations have case sensitive and case insensitive versions, so it sounds like that isn't the primary concern.

Another good story "from the trenches" in Dan's excellent article titled " Collation Hell ":

I inherited a mixed collation environment with more collations than I can count on one hand. The different collations require workarounds to avoid "cannot resolve collation conflict" errors and those workarounds kill performance due to non-sargable expressions. Dealing with mixed collations is a real pain so I strongly recommend you standardize on a single collation and deviate only after careful forethought.

He concludes:

I personally don't think performance should even be considered in choosing the proper collation. One of the reasons I'm living in collation hell is that my predecessors chose binary collations to eke out every bit of performance for our highly transactional OLTP systems. With the sole exception of a leading wildcard table scan search, I've found no measurable performance difference with our different collations. The real key to performance is query and index tuning rather than collation. If performance is important to you, I recommend you perform a performance test with your actual application queries before you choose a collation on based on performance expectations.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

I can't find anything to confirm whether properly constructed queries work faster on a case-sensitive vs case-insensitive database (although I suspect the difference is negligible), but a few things are clear to me:

1. If your business requirements don't ask for it, you are putting yourself up to a lot of extra work (this is the crux of both HLGEM and Damien_The_Unbeliever's answers).
2. If your business requirements don't ask for it, you are setting yourself up for a lot of possible errors.
3. Its way too easy to construct poorly performing queries in a case-insensitive database if a case sensitive lookup is required:

A query like:

... WHERE UPPER(GivenName) = 'PETER'

won't use an index on GivenName. You would think something like:

... WHERE GivenName = 'PETER' COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS

would work better, and it does. But for maximum performance you'd have to do something like:

... WHERE GivenName = 'PETER' COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS
    AND GivenName LIKE 'PETER'

(see this article for the details)

Answer 5

If you change the database collation but not the server collation (and they then don't match as a result), watch out when using temporary tables. Unless otherwise specified in their CREATE statement, they will use the server's default collation rather than that of the database which may cause JOINs or other comparisons against your DB's columns (assuming they're also changed to the DB's collation, as alluded to by Damien_The_Unbeliever) to fail.