Skip to main content

Notes on changing SQL Server's Collation

The SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS collation is a legacy collation and we are recommended by Microsoft to use the supported Latin1_General_CI_AS. So when I was installing a cluster recently to host the databases for SCOM 2012 I chose the latter. This was a mistake as unfortunately it still requires the old collation. 

How to change a SQL Server's collation after you've installed it is well documented and so is the command, but there are a couple of gotchas that might be worth remembering.

The command executed from a cmd.exe window is:

z:\Setup /QUIET /ACTION=REBUILDDATABASE /INSTANCENAME=MSSQLSERVER /SQLSYSADMINACCOUNTS=domain\AUser /SAPWD=MyPassword /SQLCOLLATION=SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

  • Probably due to the /QUIET option virtually no progress or errors are returned - you just need to wait for five minutes looking at an empty DOS box while it does its thing.
  • The user account name and SA password should not be in quotes or square brackets
  • The SQL services need to be stopped for the command to work. BUT, just as you think that it has completed successfully you find the collation hasn't changed despite no errors. The output from the DOS window may say the command completed but check out the log file it points to and you may find that there is an error listed due to an open connection to the database. In my case this was because sqlwriter.exe was running (it doesn't have an associated service). Kill the process using Task Manager and try again.
  • When in Mixed Mode the SAPWD (SA password) option has to be included. 
 I hope these small points help.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to create a custom Windows Event Log view and email trigger

The filtering on Windows event logs can be slow, clunky and although you can do it on fields like event ID, it seems that many event IDs are shared amongst many different errors – the event ID may match but the body of the error (therefore the actual error) may be completely unrelated. Fortunately, it is possible to filter on the contents of the body of the error message but it requires creating a custom XML query. Also, it would be handy to send out a notification email when this event gets logged. Read on to find out how to work this magic…. This example is looking for a  Warning  event  1309  for  ASP.NET 4.0.30319.0  on a web server. If you were to just filter the log on the criteria above today it would return 435 results because it is a fairly general error ID. If I filter it using XML for SqlException (what I’m really interested in) only 5 results are returned. So the first step is go to the Application Log and choose  Create Custom View…  Select the  XML  tab, check  Edit
Post a Comment
Read more

How to configure the SSAS service to use a Domain Account

NB Updating SPNs in AD is not for the faint hearted plus I got inconsistent results from different servers. Do so at your own risk! If you need the SSAS account on a SQL Server to use a domain account rather than the local “virtual” account “NT Service\MSSQLServerOLAPService”. You may think you just give the account login permissions to the server, perhaps give it sysadmin SQL permissions too. However, if you try and connect to SSAS  remotely  you may get this error: Authentication failed. (Microsoft.AnalysisService.AdomdClient) The target principal name is incorrect (Microsoft.AnalysisService.AdomdClient) From Microsoft: “A Service Principle Name (SPN) uniquely identifies a service instance in an Active Directory domain when Kerberos is used to mutually authenticate client and service identities. An SPN is associated with the logon account under which the service instance runs. For client applications connecting to Analysis Services via Kerberos authentication, th
Post a Comment
Read more

How to import a large xml file into SQL Server

(Or how to import the StackOverflow database into SQL Server) Introduction NB  This process can be generalised to import any large (>2G) xml file into SQL Server. Some SQL Server training you can find online including that by Brent Ozar uses the StackOverflow database for practice. The tables from it are available online for download in xml format. In the past it was possible to use the scripts found here, https://www.toadworld.com/platforms/sql-server/w/wiki/9466.how-to-import-the-stackoverflow-xml-into-sql-server , to import them but as each xml file is now over 2GB you will get an error like this when you try to execute them: Brent Ozar, has a link to SODDI.exe, https://github.com/BrentOzarULTD/soddi , which can import the files (I haven’t tried it) but it means downloading and importing eight tables: Badges, Comments, PostHistory, PostLinks, Posts, Tags, Users, and Votes tables which amounts to >30GB of compressed xml increasing to ~200GB when decompre
Post a Comment
Read more