Reply to: SQL Server collations

[Spacecadet]

Pay peanuts and you get...

Squirrels!

[rsingh]

I'd gladly follow your advice and fire our DBA but that would be like firing myself...

Pay peanuts and you get...

[Durbs]

Case sensitivity is crucial to what I do. Without it my work would be almost impossible.

Do you fit the little lights on Caps Lock keys?

[AtW]

For what you get it's not a bad price and you're not being stung every time you want to do anything extra as it all comes as one package.

I like SQL Server. That's because it has got Sybase roots and Sybase was sooooo good, really gutted they lost out in the end

Anyway, SQL prices are totally ridiculous - be it Microsoft or Oracle, so we are going to get rid of SQL server and replace it with open source stuff.

This time I'll pay attention to default settings though

PostgreSQL is apparently pretty good - used it some years ago in SKA when they had first beta builds for Windows, but apparently they improved and we'll use Linux version anyway...

[Spacecadet]

True. Fell off my chair the other day when I saw how much they charge for the Enterprise edition of SQL Server. $24k IIRC, I assume that's in monopoly money or something.

For what you get it's not a bad price and you're not being stung every time you want to do anything extra as it all comes as one package.
Also I think that a lot of companies who get Enterprise could have done with just getting Standard which is a lot cheaper but has enough of the features for a system which could suffer some downtime in the event of a server outage

So what's the fourth option if you decide neither SQL Server, Oracle, or MySQL is good enough?

There are plenty of other options, if you have to ask then I can't tell

[PAH]

paying exorbitant license fees

True. Fell off my chair the other day when I saw how much they charge for the Enterprise edition of SQL Server. $24k IIRC, I assume that's in monopoly money or something.

So what's the fourth option if you decide neither SQL Server, Oracle, or MySQL is good enough?

[AtW]

What were Microsoft thinking, they're so well known for always being sensitive about their cases.

paying exorbitant license fees

[PAH]

SQL Server collations ... with case insensitivity being default for strings...

What were Microsoft thinking, they're so well known for always being sensitive about their cases.

[AtW]

Case sensitivity is crucial to what I do. Without it my work would be almost impossible.

The way I see it is that this is part of noobifying stuff.

It's like BASIC which allows non-case sensitive keywords, perfect for noobs, where as C# and other proper languages would have case sensitivity.

This goes much further though - turns out one can't bloody be sure that SQL written in pretty standard way, ie:

select * from URLs where URL='xxx'

would work on all system - ffs, if I wanted case insensitivity I would have used lower() or some other stuff, making default install to have case insensitive collation is so bloody insensitive!

I am going to complain to Bill Gates in person at the first opportunity I get: this adds up to the list of people at Microsoft who did far worse things...

[PRC1964]

Why do you want case sensitivity?

In EVERY system I've worked on having a case sensitive database would have been a nightmare

Case sensitivity is crucial to what I do. Without it my work would be almost impossible.

[AtW]

Default collation is set at instance level and can easily be determined during install.

Could not change it on database level even on my small test DB, decided to walk away from that risk and just used COLLATE in SQL, this part of the SKA is definately going out of relational DB, out out out ...

I'd gladly follow your advice and fire our DBA but that would be like firing myself...

[Spacecadet]

defaults in my view should not have such sneaky side effects: this effectively forces to use explicit collation in SQL, leading to dirty code.

Change the view to specify collation then

Default collation is set at instance level and can easily be determined during install.
If it's that important then fire your DBA and get someone who knows what they're doing in!

[AtW]

Why do you want case sensitivity?

Data is case sensitive - we were storing URLs that were checked to be unique for given report before insertion, this was causing issues due to case insensitive nature of default collation. Solved now, but a bit annoyed - defaults in my view should not have such sneaky side effects: this effectively forces to use explicit collation in SQL, leading to dirty code.

In EVERY system I've worked on having a case sensitive database would have been a nightmare

Then you are not Spartacus!

[Spacecadet]

Yes.

I should have paid more attention to default collations - using case insensitive is nuts.

Why do you want case sensitivity?

In EVERY system I've worked on having a case sensitive database would have been a nightmare

[AtW]

If you don't want case sensitive query you can use lower() or (if you are concerned about performance) lower case data before inserting it into database, or have another lower cased field if you need both.



Anyway bug is fixed and lesson learnt: I was going to yank SQL Server out of the window soon, and now that's going to happen a lot sooner