A great idea for solving annoying collation issues
Rob Farley recently blogged about an excellent idea for solving the annoying collation issues so many struggle with during updates, consolitations or server rebuilds.
Currently SQL Server throws errors if tables are joined with columns that have incompatible collations (eg, tempdb has SQL_Latin_General_CI_AS but user dbs have Latin_General1).
Rob's idea is to provide a database level option which configures SQL Server to automatically use the collation of the left or right hand column in a join (or instance collation) instead of just failing. This would save users from many common collation problem & significantly easier than re-installing SQL Server or rebuilding databases with changed collations (presently a tedious task)
Rob has also posted a Feedback item on Microsoft's Connect site here:
https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=324910
If you like this idea, it would help if you could add your vote to the connect item to help give it some sway with Microsoft. It's too late for this to make it into SQL 2008, but you could help influence its release into SQL 11, 2 to 3 years from now..