Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal operation

Hi, Im having a critical problem.

I have two databases: persons and cars

In database persons I have a table
named persons_class1 as follows:
person_id char(13) not null [primary key]
name varchar(20) not null

In database cars I have a table
named cars_blue as follows:
car_id char(13) not null [primary key]
model varchar(20) not null
person_id char(13) not null

In my program the initial catalog is: cars
and Im executing the following SQL:

select cars_blue.model,persons.dbo.persons_class1.name
from cars_blue,persons.dbo.persons_class1
where cars_blue.person_id=persons.dbo.persons_class1.per son_id

and the following error occurs:
Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal operation

I also tried like instead of = and the error is:
Cannot resolve collation conflict for like operation

what can I do?

Thanks in advance
RolandA collation is the way that characters are compared/sorted. Apparently your personid columns are character based, so at least at first I'd suggest using:select cars_blue.model,persons.dbo.persons_class1.name
from cars_blue,persons.dbo.persons_class1
where cars_blue.person_id COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General = persons.dbo.persons_class1.per son_id COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General-PatP|||Collation does not pertain to the fields that are being compared but to the operator that is used in comparison.

select cars_blue.model,persons.dbo.persons_class1.name
from cars_blue,persons.dbo.persons_class1
where cars_blue.person_id = persons.dbo.persons_class1.per son_id COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1251_CI_AS|||Collation does not pertain to the fields that are being compared but to the operator that is used in comparison.So you apply the collation to the operator, and once the collation is applied that operator will then compare any two objects? At least as I see it, the comparison operator invokes an operation which is dependant on the collations of both of the objects that are being compared. Did I miss a meeting somewhere?

-PatP|||Great, I solved the problem!!, further Im allowed to change
the default collation of the database.

Thanks!
Roland|||Well, he already solved it, so there is no point to continue, but...The COLLATE tells the optimizer what code page to use while comparing 2 values, not how they need to be collated before comparison can be performed. That's why your syntax will produce an error.|||So then how can this be?SELECT Count(*)
FROM dbo.sysobjects AS a
WHERE a.name = a.name
GO

SELECT Count(*)
FROM dbo.sysobjects AS a
WHERE a.name COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN = a.name

SELECT Count(*)
FROM dbo.sysobjects AS a
WHERE a.name COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN = a.name COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN
GO

SELECT Count(*)
FROM dbo.sysobjects AS a
WHERE a.name COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN = a.name COLLATE Cyrillic_General_BIN
GO-PatP|||Oh for Codd's sake, as you see yourself, the fourth statement will produce an error because you can't perform a comparison after collating 2 values to different code pages. Doesn't it mean to you that only 1 COLLATE statement actually makes sense? In the example below you'll see that regardless of what collation is chosen for a field, COLLATE forces the comparison to be performed using a specified code page. It does not "collate" the values!

begin tran
go
create table #t1 (f1 char(1) collate Cyrillic_General_BIN not null)
create table #t2 (f1 char(1) collate latin1_general_bin not null)
insert #t1 values ('a')
insert #t2 values ('a')
go
select * from #t1, #t2 where #t1.f1 = #t2.f1 collate French_BIN
select * from #t1 inner join #t2 on #t1.f1 = #t2.f1 collate French_BIN
go
rollback tran
go|||Oh for Codd's sake, as you see yourself, the fourth statement will produce an error because you can't perform a comparison after collating 2 values to different code pages. Doesn't it mean to you that only 1 COLLATE statement actually makes sense? In the example below you'll see that regardless of what collation is chosen for a field, COLLATE forces the comparison to be performed using a specified code page. It does not "collate" the values!In your earlier post I thought you said that the collation only applied to the operator, which I assumed meant there could only be one collation for an operator. What operator are you collating within your CREATE TABLE statements?

A collation applies to data, and within SQL Server it specifically applies to character data. You can apply operators to that character data, but you can't apply a collation to the operators. The relational operators (like equal, greather than, etc) use the collation to determine how they can compare the data. This determines things like does case matter, are accents important, what order should the characters sort, etc. Note that one set of rules can be used for sorting and a quite different set can be used for comparisons in some cases within the same collation!

-PatP