Guidelines for choosing collation

Alex, you can find some guidance on choosing a collation in these BOL articles:

- Collation Settings in Setup, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143508.aspx. This describes the kinds of choices that you have, and some characteristics of each to help you evaluate tradeoffs.

- Windows Collation Sorting Styles, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143515.aspx. This discusses effects on Unicode and non-Unicode data, and includes table explaining the meaning of suffixes.

- Using Binary Collations, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143350.aspx. Includes a couple of guidelines for _BIN and _BIN2 usage.

- Windows Collation Name (Transact-SQL), http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188046.aspx. The refernece on how to specify a Windows collation name in T-SQL, with a summary of options.

Ultimately, there are three things that mostly determine what collation you need: interaction with other SQL Server servers (what do they use & support ), interaction with the applications (what do they expect & support ), and interaction with users (what do they expect ).

In particular, for the _BIN2 suffixed Latin_General (and bearing in mind that binary is case-sensitive, accent-sensitive, etc):

Binary collations in this release of SQL Server include a new set of pure code-point comparison collations. Customers can choose to migrate to the new binary collations to take advantage of true code-point comparisons, and they should utilize the new binary collations for development of new applications. The new BIN2 suffix identifies collation names that implement the new code-point collation semantics. In addition, a new comparison flag is added corresponding to BIN2 for the new binary sort. Advantages include simpler application development and clearer semantics.