Collation can be specified at the server level, database level, column level, expression level, and the identifier level. A different method is required for each of these.
Here’s how to find the server level collation:
SELECT CONVERT (varchar, SERVERPROPERTY('collation')) AS 'Server Collation';
This returns the collation like this:
Server Collation ---------------------------- SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
SQL Server, or more specifically, Transact-SQL, includes a number of built in functions, including the @@version scalar function. The @@version function is a configuration function, which returns system and build information for the current installation of SQL Server. You can run this function at any time to find out which version of SQL Server you’re using.
Here’s how:
SELECT @@version;
When running that in a command line interface, you might see results that look like this:
Microsoft SQL Server 2017 (RTM-CU6) (KB4101464) - 14.0.3025.34 (X64) Apr 9 2018 18:00:41 Copyright (C) 2017 Microsoft Corporation Developer Edition (64-bit) on Linux (Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS) 1 row(s) returned Executed in 1 ms
MySQL includes the @@version system variable and the VERSION() function that enable you to find out what version of MySQL you’re running.
Here’s an example of using the VERSION() function:
SELECT VERSION();
This simply returns the version number and no more. Like this:
8.0.11
In this article I present several ways to check your PostgreSQL version.
In PostgreSQL, we can use the pg_collation catalog to get a list of the available collations. Another way to do it is to use the \dOS command.
Using the first method, we can run the following statement to return a list of available collations in PostgreSQL:
SELECT * FROM pg_collation;
These collations are mappings from an SQL name to operating system locale categories.
You can run the following statement to return a list of available character sets in MySQL:
SHOW CHARACTER SET;
This returns a list displaying the character set name, a description, its default collation, and its maximum length.
Running the following statement lists all collations supported by the server in MySQL:
SHOW COLLATION;
However, the resulting list is quite long, and if you have a collation in mind, you can always filter the list with either the LIKE clause or the WHERE clause.
You can run the following query to return all the collations that are supported in your instance of SQL Server:
SELECT name, description FROM sys.fn_helpcollations();
Note that this returns quite a long list. Running that statement on SQL Server 2017 returns 3955 collations.
This is a quick article to demonstrate how to use Transact-SQL to change the collation of a database in SQL Server.
Here’s the basic code:
USE master; GO ALTER DATABASE Solutions COLLATE French_CI_AS ; GO
This first changes to the master database, then we use the ALTER DATABASE statement to change the collation of the Solutions database to French_CI_AS collation.
You can use the T-SQL BACKUP DATABASE statement to back up any SQL Server database.
This article shows you how to backup a database to disk. This creates a .bak file which can be used later to restore the database if required.