If the temporary table’s collation doesn't match the source data, SQL Server might perform extra work to handle the mismatch, potentially leading to performance overhead. SQL Server can support only code pages that are supported by the underlying operating system. When you perform an action that depends on collations, the SQL Server collation used by the referenced object must use a code page supported by the operating system running on the computer. This post pulls a real page apart, byte by byte, to show exactly where those differences come from and what the UTF-8 collations added in SQL Server 2019 actually do on disk. The article starts off with an introductory chapter that discusses what a collation controls and where you can define the collation in SQL Server. It also deals with one of the pain points with collations that many have encountered: collation conflicts. My colleague recently came to me with a fun challenge: why is their SQL Server Hashbytes conversion not working as expected? After some digging, I discovered significant differences between text data types when converting them. I have read that depending on your database collation you could have different hash return for same values. So, is there a way to specify a collation just for the function in order no to depend by database collation. In this guide, we dive deep into the technical tradeoffs between `CHAR (64)` and `BINARY (32)` for SHA256 hash storage in SQL Server, analyzing their impact on clustered index performance, collation safety, and developer usability. Transact-SQL statement results can vary when the statement is run in the context of different databases that have different collation settings. If possible, use a standardized collation for your organization. This way, you don't have to specify the collation in every character or Unicode expression. Collation doesn't just affect those lookups it also affects sort order. Do your queries ever use order by on these columns? If so what semantics do you expect for those? For the SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS column we have two options, either we can use the T-SQL UPPER () function or specify the collation in the WHERE clause. Here are examples of each query.