Collations are a wonderful feature. They solve problems way beyond case-insensitive search: ignoring accents and "numeric" sorting ('10' > '2') are just two more examples. However, they do have a performance impact as shown by this micro-benchmark: thebuild.com/blog/2024/11/2…
2
7
23
2K
5
As sort-based indexes (such as B-Tree) also use collations to establish their row order, the speed of the collation affects the index build time, but not so much the search time as the number of comparisons for a search is very limited.
@SQLPerfTips @MarkusWinand Many years ago I tested TPC and found several performance killer, including the Chinese collations, Decimal data types.