msde 2000 sort order?

Hi,
We are about to upgrade our businesssoftware and the requirements are that
the sort order of the database msde 2000 should be either sw/fi or fi/sw? We
have the databse installed and it is working fine with todays applications.
What is this sort order and how can we determine it?
Thanks in advance.
Martin
hi Martin,
Martin wrote:
> Hi,
> We are about to upgrade our businesssoftware and the requirements are
> that the sort order of the database msde 2000 should be either sw/fi
> or fi/sw? We have the databse installed and it is working fine with
> todays applications. What is this sort order and how can we determine
> it?
sort order (or more correctly, the collating sequence) is a set of rules
determining how characters compare and thus how they are sorted.. this imply
case sensitiveness... this set of rules is based on the collation set of the
server... SQL Server support collation at the server level, specifying the
settings for all system databases (that becomes the default for all new user
databases), at database level, implying the default setting for a specified
user database, and at the column level, where you can specify a different
setting for particular column(s) in the CREATE TABLE DDL statement..
the collation is important as it specifyes how all charcter based (column)
values are ordered and compared as different languages have different rules
for comparison...each different setting can specify that A = a = = or
determin different behaviors, or that a specified char precedes or is
successive to another one...
for greater details about that please have a look at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...ar_da_6ttf.asp
you can inspect your current setting querying
SELECT SERVERPROPERTY ( 'Collation' ) AS [Server Collation] ,
DATABASEPROPERTYEX ( 'your_user_database' ,'Collation' ) AS [Specific
Database Collation]
that returns the current system databases setting and a specified user
database setting...
usually, in western languages system this defaults to Latin1_General_CI_AS,
where CI stands for Case Insensite (A=a) and AS stands for Accent Sensitive
(a<>)

> that the sort order of the database msde 2000 should be either sw/fi or
> fi/sw
if you mean finnish and swedish, they are both part of the same set of rules
and collation,
SELECT * FROM
::fn_helpcollations ()
WHERE name LIKE 'Finn%' COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS
that includes 17 different settings, and I think Finnish_Swedish_CI_AS that
should be the default when installing MSDE on a finnish/swedish operating
system..
if your current server setting (where all your current applications are
running fine) is different from the one required by your new application you
can create the new application's databases specifying the required collation
as part of the CREATE DATABASE statement,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...reate_1up1.asp ,
and thus maintaining the old value for all databases but the db of your new
application...
just one caveat... this can imply some sort of penalty for the new
database(s) as the system databases do have a different setting and all
operations requiring tempdb database (for sorting, etc) will incur in some
overhead due to conversions...
Andrea Montanari (Microsoft MVP - SQL Server)
http://www.asql.biz/DbaMgr.shtmhttp://italy.mvps.org
DbaMgr2k ver 0.15.0 - DbaMgr ver 0.60.0
(my vb6+sql-dmo little try to provide MS MSDE 1.0 and MSDE 2000 a visual
interface)
-- remove DMO to reply
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