I need to create databases in French, German, and Spanish. These databases
will only use a single language and (for now) is non-unicode.

MS Books Online has recommended the following collations to be set at
database creation time for FGS. Can anyone confirm these collation settings
are correct? Why wouldn't the general Latin collation apply to each of these
as they do in Oracle? What else do I need to consider?

French - French_CI_AS
German - Latin1_General_CI_AS
Spanish - Modern_Spanish_CI_AS

Any is appreciated. Thanks.

There are a bunch of good collations available for each language/culture. So, I suggest you first
read up on collation so you can decide whether to go for an SQL collation or a Windows collation.
And also whether to be case sensitive, and accent sensitive.

Based on above you will have one or more candidate collation for each language. Now, if you were to
use Unicode, one would think that there shouldn't be a need for different collations. But you need
to consider ordering. So, if you truly want to be multi-lingual in all aspects, you need to go for
some collation, and clutter your SQL queries with the COLLATE clause for the "persons" wanting to
use some other collation.

Btw, if you go non-Unicode, you are in trouble if you want to use the same collation. Say that one
"strange" German character uses the same "ASCII" code as some other "strange" French character...
See the problem?

--
Tibor Karaszi, SQL Server MVP
http://www.karaszi.com/sqlserver/default.asp
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/tibor_karaszi


"hok" <hok@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:64470B34-F226-4E9E-AD22-11D2DEDAC7D0@microsoft.com...
>I need to create databases in French, German, and Spanish. These databases
> will only use a single language and (for now) is non-unicode.
>
> MS Books Online has recommended the following collations to be set at
> database creation time for FGS. Can anyone confirm these collation settings
> are correct? Why wouldn't the general Latin collation apply to each of these
> as they do in Oracle? What else do I need to consider?
>
> French - French_CI_AS
> German - Latin1_General_CI_AS
> Spanish - Modern_Spanish_CI_AS
>
> Any is appreciated. Thanks.