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# Monday, 14 October 2013

Till recently we were living in simple world of string comparisons in SQL style, and now everything has changed.

From the university years we knew that strings in SQL are compared by first trimming traling spaces, and then comparing in C style.

Well, the picture was a little more complex, as collations were involved (national, case sensivity), and as different SQL vendors implemented it differently.

Next,
we're dealing with programs converted from COBOL, which we originally thought follow SQL rules when strings are compared.

 

Here is where the problem has started.

Once we have found that java program has branched differently than original COBOL, and the reason was that the COBOL and java compared two strings differently:

  • COBOL: "A\n" < "A";
  • Java: "A\n" > "A"

We have looked into COBOL Language Reference and found the rules:

Operands of equal size
Characters in corresponding positions of the two operands are compared, beginning with the leftmost character and continuing through the rightmost character.

If all pairs of characters through the last pair test as equal, the operands are considered as equal.

If a pair of unequal characters is encountered, the characters are tested to determine their relative positions in the collating sequence. The operand that contains the character higher in the sequence is considered the greater operand.

Operands of unequal size
If the operands are of unequal size, the comparison is made as though the shorter operand were extended to the right with enough spaces to make the operands equal in size.

You can see that strings must not be trimmed but padded with spaces to the longer string, and only then they are compared. This subtle difference has significant impact for characters below the space.

So, here we've found that COBOL and SQL comparisons are different.

But then we have questioned how really SQL beheaves?

We've tested comparisons in SQL Server and DB2, and have seen that our understanding of SQL comparison holds. It works as if trimming spaces, and then comparing.

But again we have looked into SQL-92 definition, and that's what we see there:

8.2 <comparison predicate>
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 characters, 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 character in the character set of X and Y that collates less than any string under CS. Otherwise, the pad character is a <space>.

So, what we see is that SQL-92 rules are very close to COBOL rules, but then we reach the question: how come that at least SQL Server and DB2 implement string comparison differently than SQL-92 dictates?

Update: we have found that both SQL Server and DB2 have their string collation defined in a way that <space> is less than any other character. So the following is always true: '[' + char(13) + ']' > '[ ]'.

Monday, 14 October 2013 20:23:11 UTC  #    Comments [0] -
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