When using SQL Server, you can use T-SQL to specify the default collation of a database. Specifically, you can use the COLLATE clause of either the CREATE DATABASE or ALTER DATABASE  statements.

The COLLATE clause is optional – if you don’t use it when creating the database, the database will use the default collation of the server (which was specified at the time SQL Server was installed). And if you don’t specify the clause when altering the database, its default collation won’t change.
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By default, each column in a SQL Server database uses the collation that’s been specified at the database level. And by default, the database collation is taken from the server collation. However, these collation settings can be overridden, both at the database level and the column level by explicitly setting the collation at that level.

This page demonstrates how to specify the collation of a column. You can set the collation by adding the T-SQL COLLATE clause to the CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE statements. When you use those statements, you define the column and its properties, including any collation settings. The COLLATE clause is optional so if you don’t include it, the column will simply use the default collation of the database.
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In SQL Server, collation can be specified at the server level, database level, and the column level, as well as inside expressions.

To find out what collation a specific column uses, run a T-SQL query against sys.columns. Like this:

SELECT 
    name, 
    collation_name 
FROM sys.columns 
WHERE name = N'ArtistName';

This results in something like this:

name   collation_name              
----------  ----------------------------
ArtistName  SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

This example returns the collation of a column called ArtistName. Simply replace that with the name of the column you’d like to query.
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