The default collation of a database is inherited from the default collation of the instance of the SQL Server. In most cases, it is: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS If you want to change it to, say, case sensitive one: Latin1_General_BIN You have to set the database in single user mode first: ALTER DATABASE myDatabase SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE ALTER DATABASE myDatabase COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN ALTER DATABASE myDatabase SET MULTI_USER Please note that changing the colaltion of the database will NOT change the collation of the columns that are already in the tabase, only the default collation of any new columns you will create in the future. However, changing the database collation will affect the Identifier's case sensitivity right away. The identifiers include Tables Names and Field Names. If you change the Collation to Latin1_General_Bin, you have to specify the Field Names and Tables Names in case sentitive way when writing T-SQL statements.