Case sensitive comparison in SQL Server

SQL Server compares strings without regard to case, which is a good thing most of the time, but can sometimes be annoying.

Luckily I found this article on case-sensitive string comparison, which gives a good overview of the possibilities:

• cast the string to VARBINARY(length)
• use COLLATE to specify a case-sensitive collation
• calculate the BINARY_CHECKSUM() of the strings to compare
• change the table column’s COLLATION property
• use computed columns (implicit calculation of VARBINARY)

I chose the COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS method to perform the queries I needed.