The curious case of trailing spaces in SQL
A while ago I was quite surprised to see that the following query returns 1 instead of 0:
SELECT COUNT(*) WHERE N'Tim' = N'Tim '; -- notice the trailing space
Apparently this is just standard behaviour. Here is an extract from sql1992.txt (Section 8.2 Paragraph 3):
3) The comparison of two character strings is determined as fol- lows: 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.