Have you ever run into an error like this?
Cannot resolve the collation conflict between “pick a collation” and “pick another collation” in the equal to operation.
This kind of error seems pretty straight forward and it is safe to say that it generally happens in a query. When you know what the query is and you get this error, it is pretty easy to spot and fix the problem. At least you can band-aid it well enough to get past the error with a little use of the collate clause in your query.
But what if the error you are seeing is popping up when you are trying to use Management Studio (SSMS)? The error is less than helpful and can look a little something like this.
And for a little context in how that error message popped up, here is a little better image.
As you can see here, the error message popped up just trying to get into the Extended Events Sessions folder in SSMS. Just trying to expand the folder to see a list of the sessions on the server throws this error. So what is really happening?
Background
First let’s cover a little background on this problem. This server was poorly configured. There was considerable set it and forget it action with this server – meaning all defaults and and a lot of bad choices. In an effort to update the instance to meet corporate standards, the client attempted to change the server collation to “Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_SC”.
Changing collations on a server is a rare occurrence in the grand scheme of things. If you do it at the right time, all will go well. Do it on a server that is poorly configured then there is a little more risk. In this case, the collation change had failed for the server. In order to figure out if the Server collation change had failed, we can run a few tests. First though, let’s see what that query looks like that was causing the error from within SSMS.
The query here is one time that profiler can actually come in handy (not that I would try to rely on it too much) to help retrieve given that there is a collation issue with Extended Events (XE). We can now take this a step further and start to show that the Server collation change failed. Let’s check the collations on each of those objects and then validate the server collation.
As we can see from the image, the collation for the master database indeed was changed (it is done before the user databases) but then the change for the server collation failed. As it turns out, due to the sequence of events, if there is a failure in changing the collation in a user database, then the collation change for the server fails but the master database will indeed change. We can further confirm this from the output of the attempted collation change. Here is a snippet from a failed change (sadly does not show the user database change failure due to extent of output).
So, how do we go about fixing it?
The Fix
Well, since we know where the failure occurs, the fix becomes pretty apparent. It may be a lot of work – but it isn’t too bad. The fix is to detach all user databases, attempt the collation change again, and then re-attach all databases. To help with user database detach and re-attach, I would recommend using a script that can generate the necessary detach and attach statements for all databases. It will save a bit of time.
Once, reattached, I can try to look at the XE Sessions from SSMS with much different results (shown here).
You see? It is as easy as that.
Final Thoughts
The default collation for SQL Server is a pretty bad idea. Sure, it works but so does SQL Server 7. When you have the opportunity to update to more current technologies, it is a good idea. Sometimes though, that upgrade can come with some pain. This article shows how to alleviate one such pain point by fixing problems related to collation conflicts and XE.
This is yet another tool in the ever popular and constantly growing library of Extended Events. Are you still stuck on Profiler? Try one of these articles to help remedy that problem (here and here)
The Extended Events library has just about something for everybody. Please take the time to explore it and become more familiar with this fabulous tool!
