Re "Character Sets And Collations", VARCHAR means variable length. It does not mean "automatically strip blanks" SQL-92 8.2(3) [1]: 3) The comparison of two ch

Re "Character Sets And Collations", VARCHAR means variable length. It does not mean "automatically strip blanks" SQL-92 8.2(3) [1]: 3) The comparison of two character strings is determined as follows: a) If the length in characters of X is not equal to the length in characters of Y, then the shorter string is effectively replaced, for the purposes of comparison, with a copy of itself that has been extended to the length of the longer string by concatenation on the right of one or more pad char- acters, where the pad character is chosen based on CS. If CS has the NO PAD attribute, then the pad character is an implementation-dependent character different from any char- acter in the character set of X and Y that collates less than any string under CS. Otherwise, the pad character is a <space>. b) The result of the comparison of X and Y is given by the col- lating sequence CS. c) Depending on the collating sequence, two strings may com- pare as equal even if they are of different lengths or con- tain different sequences of characters. When the operations MAX, MIN, DISTINCT, references to a grouping column, and the UNION, EXCEPT, and INTERSECT operators refer to character strings, the specific value selected by these operations from a set of such equal values is implementation-dependent. Other implementations: MSSQL has a padding option for this [2] Redbrick docs state "A character string stored in a VARCHAR column has exactly the same length as the source string or the expression that generated the string (including trailing blanks). Character strings stored in a VARCHAR column can vary in length" [3] [1] http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~shadow/sql/sql1992.txt http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~shadow/sql/sql1992.txt [2] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316626 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316626 [3] http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/rbhelp/v6r3/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.redbrick.doc6.3%2Fsqlrg%2Fsqlrg17.htm http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/rbhelp/v6r3/index.j...