Upgrading Character Set, Sort Order, and Collation

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 supports several different ways to specify collations. You no longer have to separately specify the code page used for character data, the sort order used for character data, and the collation used for Unicode data. When you upgrade, SQL collations can be specified for compatibility with existing instances of SQL Server.

Because the default collation for an instance of Microsoft SQL Server is defined during setup, it is important to become familiar with collation settings in SQL Server 2000 when:

• Your application code depends in some way on the behavior of previous SQL Server collations.
  
  
• You are going to use the replication feature with existing installations of SQL Server 6.5 or SQL Server 7.0.
  
  
• You must store character data that reflects multiple languages.

See Also

Collation Options for International Support

Collations

Selecting Collations

Specifying the Default Collation for an Instance of SQL Server