Doing SQL searches on accented characters

Here's how to force a collation type, in this particular case, it'll ignore case and accents when doing a search in MS SQL Server:

SELECT column1 FROM Table1
WHERE column1 = 'user' COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_Cp850_CI_AI
ORDER BY column1 COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_Cp850_CI_AI

An article on DBAzine.com goes into detail on this and has all the info you need. Also, be sure to check out the TSQL reference on COLLATION that would have been installed with the client tools.