The server collation acts as the default collation for all system databases that are installed with the instance of SQL Server, and also any newly created user databases.
You should carefully consider the server-level collation, because it can affect:
Sorting and comparison rules in =, JOIN, ORDER BY and other operators that compare textual data.
Collation of the CHAR, VARCHAR, NCHAR, and NVARCHAR columns in system views, system functions, and the objects in tempdb (for example, temporary tables).
Names of the variables, cursors, and GOTO labels. For example, the variables @pi and @PI are considered as different variables if the server-level collation is case-sensitive, and the same variables if the server-level collation is case-insensitive.
Server collation in SQL Server
The server collation is specified during SQL Server installation. The default server-level collation is based upon the locale of the operating system.
For example, the default collation for systems using US English (en-US) is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. For more information, including the list of OS locale to default collation mappings, see the "Server-level collations" section of Collation and Unicode Support.
Note
The server-level collation for SQL Server Express LocalDB is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS and cannot be changed, either during or after installation.
Change the server collation in SQL Server
Changing the default collation for an instance of SQL Server can be a complex operation.
Note
Instead of changing the default collation of an instance of SQL Server, you can specify a default collation for each new database you create via the COLLATE clause of the CREATE DATABASE and ALTER DATABASE statements. For more information, see Set or Change the Database Collation.
Create all the databases and all the objects in them.
Import all your data.
Set the server collation in Azure SQL Managed Instance
Server-level collation in Azure SQL Managed Instance can be specified when the instance is created and cannot be changed later. You can set server-level collation via Azure portal or PowerShell and Resource Manager template while you are creating the instance. Default server-level collation is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS.
If you are migrating databases from SQL Server to Azure SQL Managed Instance, check the server collation in the source SQL Server using SERVERPROPERTY(N'Collation') function and create a managed instance that matches the collation of your SQL Server. Migrating a database from SQL Server to SQL Managed Instance with the server-level collations that are not matched might cause several unexpected errors in the queries. You cannot change the server-level collation on the existing managed instance.
Collations in Azure SQL Database
You cannot change or set the logical server collation on Azure SQL Database, but can configure each database's collations both for data and for the catalog. The catalog collation determines the collation for system metadata, such as object identifiers. Both collations can be specified independently when you create the database in the Azure portal, in T-SQL with CREATE DATABASE, in PowerShell with New-AzSqlDatabase.
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.
SQL Server collation refers to a set of character and character encoding rules, and influences how information is stored according to the order in the data page, how data is matched by comparing two columns, and how information is arranged in the T-SQL query statement.
A collation specifies the bit patterns that represent each character in a dataset. Collations also determine the rules that sort and compare data. SQL Server supports storing objects that have different collations in a single database.
The SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS collation is a SQL collation and the rules around sorting data for unicode and non-unicode data are different. The Latin1_General_CI_AS collation is a Windows collation and the rules around sorting unicode and non-unicode data are the same.
Default server-level collation is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. If you are migrating databases from SQL Server to Azure SQL Managed Instance, check the server collation in the source SQL Server using SERVERPROPERTY(N'Collation') function and create a managed instance that matches the collation of your SQL Server.
Expand Databases, expand the database and then expand Tables. Expand the table that contains the column and then expand Columns. Right-click the column and select Properties. If the collation property is empty, the column is not a character data type.
Definitions of collation. noun. assembling in proper numerical or logical sequence. type of: aggregation, assembling, collecting, collection. the act of gathering something together.
Both will use Unicode sorting rules. In short, windows collations perform as slow as Unicode data types, and SQL collations perform much faster. However, in such cases the sorting order must be taken into consideration because it could change the results.
The default MySQL server character set and collation are utf8mb4 and utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci , but you can specify character sets at the server, database, table, column, and string literal levels.
In the above code snippet, the COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS clause specifies the collation for the Name column as case-sensitive ( CS ) and accent-sensitive ( AS ). As a result, the data will be sorted considering case and accent differences.
Common collation names either end in _BIN or _CI_AS such as Latin1_General_BIN or SQL_Latin1_General_CI_AS. The _BIN means that this is a binary sort order where strings will be sorted using a computer binary order, the result is that A-Z are before a-z and things like accented characters will be at the end.
Expand Databases, expand the database and then expand Tables.Expand the table that contains the column and then expand Columns.Right-click the column and select Properties. If the collation property is empty, the column is not a character data type.
Collation cannot be changed on an existing dedicated SQL pool database. If you need to have a different collation at the dedicated SQL pool level, create a new dedicated SQL pool with the required collation. To change the default collation for a serverless SQL pool database, you can use ALTER DATABASE statement.
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SQL Server 
