How to Show the Collation of a Column in SQL Server (T-SQL)

Posted on by Ian

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.

Also see: