Update Collation of all fields in database on the fly

user_154186 0
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We recently moved our database from our SQL Server 2005 server to our SQL Server 2008 server. Everything moved over fine, however now we are finding that we are getting collation conflicts. The old server had a different collation with the new server.

Now our tables created before the move are one collation, and the ones created after are another collation.

Is there a way to update the tables/columns with the old collation to the new collation?

I understand setting the default database/server collation does not modify any existing tables (link). I really don't want to recreate the database if I don't have to.

Any help really appreciated.

UPDATE

Thanks for your help guys, finally got it working.

For future reference, here is my final script:

SELECT 'ALTER TABLE [' + SYSOBJECTS.Name + '] ALTER COLUMN [' + SYSCOLUMNS.Name + '] ' +
SYSTYPES.name + 
    CASE systypes.NAME
    WHEN 'text' THEN ' '
    ELSE
    '(' + RTRIM(CASE SYSCOLUMNS.length
    WHEN -1 THEN 'MAX'
    ELSE CONVERT(CHAR,SYSCOLUMNS.length)
    END) + ') ' 
    END

    + ' ' + ' COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS ' + CASE ISNULLABLE WHEN 0 THEN 'NOT NULL' ELSE 'NULL' END
    FROM SYSCOLUMNS , SYSOBJECTS , SYSTYPES
    WHERE SYSCOLUMNS.ID = SYSOBJECTS.ID
    AND SYSOBJECTS.TYPE = 'U'
    AND SYSTYPES.Xtype = SYSCOLUMNS.xtype
    AND SYSCOLUMNS.COLLATION IS NOT NULL
    AND NOT ( sysobjects.NAME LIKE 'sys%' )
    AND NOT ( SYSTYPES.name LIKE 'sys%' )
    GO

Here is the site that contained the script I based it on. I had to tweak it to get it working correctly.

sql-server-2008
8 Answers

Further to Owais Iqbal's answer rewritten the code by edosoft and put it in a loop to execute the actual T-SQL statements, you can grab the default collation from the database

-- **************** BEGIN INPUT **********************
USE [YourDBName]
-- **************** END INPUT ************************

-- **************** BEGIN GET DB COLLATION ***********
DECLARE @collation NVARCHAR(128)
SELECT @collation = collation_name
FROM sys.databases WHERE database_id = DB_ID()

PRINT 'Default database collation: ' + @collation
PRINT ''
-- **************** END GET DB COLLATION *************

-- **************** BEGIN LOGIC **********************
user_123647480
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