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Message Posted: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 @ 20:23:17 GMT


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Subj:		Re: Comparing blanks and Nulls

From:		Michael Larkins

Anomy.Anom:

You wrote:

You say "blank (non-null, non-spaces)" but there is no such thing. Teradata trims trailing spaces from VARCHAR fields and pads CHAR fields with trailing spaces.

This is a common misconception. Teradata will store whatever you give it in a varchar column.

     ct vartbl (varcol varchar(15));
     ins vartbl ('');
     ins vartbl ('a ');
     ins vartbl (b');
     ins vartbl (trim('c     '));
     sel varcol, char(varcol) from vartbl order by 2;

     varcol   Characters(varcol)
                    0
       b            1
       c            1
       a            2

Hope this helps clear up your confusion.

Michael Larkins
Certified Teradata Master
Certified Teradata SQL Instructor