SQL Server backup collation issue

I was given SQL Server 2005 backup with collation set to : SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI

When I select any data it looks like the data is saved in different collation , for example :

user : "Micha³" - which should be "Michał" and so on

I'v开发者_运维知识库e tried converting tables and database to one of Polish collation, also tried select with collate but it still looks the same.

Have anyone had similar issue and knows what actually is going on ?

Collation (sorting order) implies character encoding (mapping characters to bytes) - did you try using Unicode (utf-8, utf-16)? In a pinch, Latin-2 (a.k.a. ISO-8859-2, Central European single-byte charset) may be what you're looking for.

In other words, Latin-1 is a single-byte character encoding for Western-European languages, but it can't store characters from Central-European (or other) languages.

See also this for a longer explanation of charsets, collations, and other headaches.

You say "when I select ...". Where are the query results being displayed?

To make long story short, the collation didn't have much to do with this issue, the other application that saved the data did that using some mixed-up encoding and I found out that they weren't able to display the data properly themselves.