Public preview: New Japanese collations are available in Azure SQL Database

New collations that are built for the Japanese market are available in Azure SQL Database. New Japanese collations enable developers who are building applications for Japanese market to implement sorting and filtering operations that work with Japanese characters by using the latest Japanese linguistic rules. The names of new collations start with Japanese_XJIS_140 or Japanese_Bushu_Kakusu_140 prefixes.

An example of a SQL table with new Japanese collations that are defined in some columns is shown in the following code:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.People
GO
CREATE TABLE dbo.People(
    id int primary key identity,
    name nvarchar(50) collate Japanese_XJIS_140_CI_AI_KS,
    surname nvarchar(50) collate Japanese_XJIS_140_CI_AI_WS,
    address nvarchar(200),
    town nvarchar(50) collate Japanese_Bushu_Kakusu_140_CS_AS_VSS
)

New Japanese collations support the recognition of Ideographic Variation Selectors (IVS) that are used in the Japanese language. There is one additional flag (VSS – Variation Selector Sensitivity) that enables developers to choose whether the new comparison rules use or ignore variation selectors when text with the variation selectors is compared.