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Collation Conflicts with Extended Events

Jason Brimhall takes us through a nasty scenario:

Have you ever run into an error like this?

Cannot resolve the collation conflict between “pick a collation” and “pick another collation” in the equal to operation.

This kind of error seems pretty straight forward and it is safe to say that it generally happens in a query. When you know what the query is and you get this error, it is pretty easy to spot and fix the problem. At least you can band-aid it well enough to get past the error with a little use of the collate clause in your query.

But what if the error you are seeing is popping up when you are trying to use Management Studio (SSMS)? The error is less than helpful and can look a little something like this.

In this case, it was when trying to expand Extended Events sessions. Click through to see what’s going on and how to fix the problem.