Collation Options and International Support

SQL Server Setup

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 supports all languages supported by Microsoft Windows operating systems. This topic presents details about language support in SQL Server 2005, and how SQL Server supports Unicode and non-Unicode data formats.

Collation Changes in SQL Server 2005

The following changes and enhancements are new in SQL Server 2005:

  • Support for new and updated collations from Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, including Far East collations that support supplementary characters.
  • Support for supplementary character string comparison based on code point with new collations in SQL Server 2005.
  • Addition of a binary flag for true code point comparisons: Binary-code point.
  • Improved migration path from SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005.
  • Deprecation of the Hindi and Lithuanian_Classic Windows collations and deprecation of the SQL_ALTDiction_CP1253_CS_AS SQL collation. These collations are supported but will not show up in ::fn_helpcollations() builtin function. Support for these collations will be removed in a future SQL Server release. For more information on the SQL Server deprecation policy, see Backward Compatibility.

For more information, see Collation Settings in Setup

See Also