SQL SERVER – Global Variable @@DEF_SORTORDER_ID – Old and May be Deprecated

I always blog about things which are new and updated but today we are going to write about something which is very old and it is near deprecated. We are going to about the global variable @@DEF_SORTORDER_ID. Let us see what it is and how it was used once.

When there was SQL Server 7, we actually did not have fancy words like Collation. We used to have a default sort order for our server. The global variable @@DEF_SORTORDER_ID is actually representative of global sort order for the server.

I ran the following script on my server and I got a result as 52.

SELECT @@DEF_SORTORDER_ID

I was not sure what actually 52 means. However, a quick research on the internet revealed that 52 is actually from 1252 ISO character set and its name is actually nocase_iso. It also represents dictionary order, case-insensitive.

Honestly, I even can’t remember all the data above, as I said I looked on the internet and found that over here.

Here are a few other blog posts which are related to this subject, you may find them interesting as well.

• SQL SERVER – Example of Width Sensitive and Width Insensitive Collation
• SQL SERVER – Collation and Collation Sensitivity – Quiz – Puzzle – 6 of 31
• SQL SERVER – Effect of Case Sensitive Collation on Resultset
• SQL SERVER – Creating Database with Different Collation on Server
• SQL SERVER – Effect of Collation on Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #026 – Video

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)