SQL Server ; working around collation mismatches
You use the collate operator in the join.  Such as:

select &lt;column list&gt;
from dbo.firsttable f
join linkedserver.database.dbo.secondtable d 
   on f.name collate database_default = d.name collate database_default 


Of course, you can also specify a specific collation, such as: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI