title: Affecting performance with SQL Collation
body: <p>I would just like to check a few things:</p>
  
  <p>Q1) Latin1_General_CI_AS is Case Insensitive, Accent Sensitive : I.e. SQL will see the following as equal - "hello" and "HELLO"</p>
  
  <p>With LINQ I quiet often do:</p>
  
  <pre><code>db.Where(v =&gt; v.Email == "some email".ToLower())
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Q2) Assuming my understanding to Q1 is correct, am I just wasting processing time calling ToLower() in my queries?</p>
  
  <p>Q3) Does anybody know if there would be a performance improvement in using Latin1_General_bin over Latin1_General_CI_AS? I.e have there already been performance tests done on a blog etc (thought of this as I was writing the post, so not looked my self yet)</p>