Case sensitive queries in SQL Server

In SQL Server, whether your database is case sensitive or not, depends on the collation that your database uses.

If you have a database that has been setup with a case insensitive collation sequence, but you want to retrieve or sort some data in a case sensitive way, you can do it like this:

SELECT * 
FROM MyTable 
WHERE aField = 'a' COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS

or, for sorting:

SELECT *
FROM MyTable
ORDER BY aField COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS

As you can see, you just have to define a case sensitive (CS stands for Case Sensitive) collation in your query.

Of course, if you have a table that contains data that should be treated in a case-sensitive way, you can create that table/columns with a case sensitive collation sequence.