In the past I’ve wrote some blog post promoting documented K2 collation requirement. With release K2 Five this requirement changed and I guess I have to mention it on my blog as essentially it makes my old blog posts about required K2 database collation incorrect.
So recently (with release of K2 Five) all K2 documentation was updated and states that our requited collation now is “SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS“. Where to find this information?
In K2 Installation and Configuration Guide you can find “SQL and Reporting Services Operational Requirements” section which says that:
– Case-sensitive databases are NOT supported.
– The following collation setting is required for the K2 database: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
And as usually you can find the same information in K2 Product Compatibility, Integration and Support matrix:
What is good about this change is that SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS will be default collation if you installing SQL Server on top of Windows Server which has been installed with US location/language settings – so at least some people will meet this requirement by accident.
What is bad is that collation requirement was just silently changed in documentation with release of K2 Five without any explanations. According to my current knowledge collation which was mentioned in documentation before was a requirement only for pre-4.6.11 versions of K2. So in case you are doing new installation of K2 4.6.11 or newer make sure that your SQL Server instance provisioned with SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS collation.
Somewhat mixed blessing is change which was made to K2 Five installer to enforce this collation: what it does at the moment is just enforces this collation on K2 DB level while ignoring SQL Server instance level collation. So in case you not provisioned SQL Server instance with the right collation you will get an errors post installation and will be forced to change SQL Server instance level collation to fix this. That’s something that I hope will be corrected in K2 installer in the future so that it warns you about wrong instance level collation issues before you start your installation.
Conclusion: read vendor documentation carefully before doing your installation even if you did it many times before 🙂
Update (Feb 2018): Current guidelines are:
– For upgrade installations be sure to make SQL server instance and K2 DB collation are the same (in case you moving K2 DB onto new server)
– For clean installs I would suggest stick to Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS (especially if you do 4.7 install). I will probably write more detailed post to explain this position later