Preventing Incorrect Collation Selection At Install Time

If you’ve ever encountered the words collation and conflict in the same sentence, or better, error message, then you’re going to love this one.  It’s a Microsoft Connect request that exists since 2008, created by SQL Server MVP Erland Sommarskog, and it suggests that the SQL Server installer should not select a server collation by default.

Ow yeah, sure got my vote!  I don’t think I ever came across a server which was initially installed with the correct collation unless it was installed by myself.  Not selecting a collation by default in the setup means that whoever is installing the server, usually a DBA, needs to think about (and more importantly: understand!) what collations are and how selecting the wrong one might impact the applications using the databases.  No more messed up servers with half of the databases using Latin1_General_CI_AS and the other half using SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS, with possibly a couple of French_CI_AS databases thrown in for fun.

Sound familiar?  Then vote this up!