>> Hello everyone. My name is Colin Murphy.
I'm a Senior Product Marketing Manager here at Microsoft,
and I'm joined here today with Anna Thomas,
a data applied scientists under Data Division. Welcome Anna.
>> Thanks Colin, I'm excited to be here.
>> Today we're going to talk about
collations in Azure SQL Database.
So my first question to you Anna is,
what is a collation?
>> Yeah, it's a great question.
So collations basically provide the sorting rules, case,
and accent sensitivity for the characters in your database.
By selecting a collation for your server, or your database,
or your expression or column,
you're actually affecting a lot of
the ways that the operations work in the database.
So it seems simple,
but it can have a very important effect.
>> Cool. So is there a default commissioner,
a default like a language that SQL comes with?
>> Yeah, that's a great question.
So the most common collation,
we can check it here by
selecting the server property of collation.
But this is the most common one,
and just to break it down a little bit,
what's here is we have the type of collation set,
this is the SQL collation.
Then we have the dictionary or language that's being used,
and this is the Latin 1 General.
Then a few acronyms that you
see that might not make a lot of sense.
But CP1 specifies the code page where
the code point matches
the characters that are used by the collation.
Then you have things like CI or AS, and there's a few others,
and those specify the case insensitivity in this case,
so case insensitivity and accent sensitivity.
So there are a few other options,
but this is the probably the most common.
Another thing I wanted to point out is that,
in Azure SQL Database managed instance,
you actually have to specify this upon
creation of your managed instance.
So you can see here I've specified it using the portal,
but you could also use PowerShell.
>> Okay. Well, that's cool.
So how many languages collations are there?
>> Yeah that's a fun question.
So if I switch back,
we can take a look at the ones that are available.
What you'll see is there's a very long list, different ones.
So you could really not quite creative,
but hopefully find one that fits your situation.
>> There's just one manipulation
like one language that for database,
is that what you get is just one?
>> Yeah. So actually you can
specify at the database level or even the column or the collation,
sorry, the expression level.
You can do that by just specifying
this term collate when you create,
save the database like we do here.
So I'll kick this off and
then we can walk through what it's doing.
So what we're doing is we're declaring the variable obviously,
and then we're going to store
the top collation in the collation variable.
Then we're just going to create the database,
give it a name, and say collate with that collation.
>> Great. So that's really good if
you've got like global applications.
So your application will be multilingual and
serving a couple of continents.
You can have an idea of a collation
just in one column or a couple of columns.
>> Yeah, that's a great question.
I think it's a great example, and a great use case,
and a very simple thing that can
have a pretty big impact on your applications.
>> Great. Well, I hope
everyone understands what a collation is now.
So if you do, like this little video snippet,
and subscribe to this channel.
Then we'll post the URL,
where you can learn more information about collations. Thank you.
>>Thanks.
[MUSIC]