Review the handling of Fixed Width fields

[jdunkerley]

Want to verify how SQLite, Postgres, MySQL and SQL Server all handle fixed width strings. Only have Postgres for now.

Don't pad to full length (at least not in Postgres).

Want to check:

• Length
• Concatenation (e.g. '"'||Field||'"')
• Equality
• Check the raw value coming out of JDBC.

We need to be able to round trip from the database to memory and back writing consistent.

[Cassandra-Clark]

SQL Server

length is set to fixed and automatically pads to full length. Concatenation will attempt to concatenate at the end of the padded value by default Equality ignores trailing spaces, so 'MYTEXT ' is the same as 'MYTEXT' or 'MYTEXT '

[Cassandra-Clark]

Postgres

Postgres Length is set to fixed but does not pad Postgres Concatenation does not automatically pad values by default in fixed width Postgres Equality ignores trailing spaces

[Cassandra-Clark]

MySQL

MySQL will pad trailing whitespace on load, but on retrieval will remove that whitespace unless PAD_CHAR_TO_FULL_LENGTH mode is set. This also impacts concatenation, by default the concatenation will not pad values in fixed width concatenation unless this mode is set. MySQL Equality ignores trailing spaces