Padding

Hyperstage treats padding differently than other DBMS engines. Hyperstage assumes literal comparisons of text fields, including all whitespace characters. Therefore, a string containing two spaces is different than a string containing one space or an empty (0 length) string, which is also different than the NULL value.

The Hyperstage padding definition is compatible with the SQL standard. However, most DBMS systems have defined less restricted, customizable rules regarding text comparison. For example, 'abc ' = 'abc' may be true in some databases, but is not true in Hyperstage.

Note: In CHAR columns, trailing spaces are trimmed on LOAD, INSERT, and UPDATE, whereas in VARCHAR columns values are loaded with all spaces.


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