Update Collation of all fields in database on the fly
sql-server-2008
Solution
You can change the collation of any new objects that are created in a user database by using the COLLATE clause of the ALTER DATABASE statement. This statement does not change the collation of the columns in any existing user-defined tables. These can be changed by using the COLLATE clause of ALTER TABLE.
Reference: Setting and Changing the Database Collation
If there are too many columns, you can loop through SYS.COLUMNS to apply the ALTER TABLE statement.
Problem
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.