Taking a closer look at the results in you original question it looks like your emp table was populated with space padded data (i.e. 'CLERK     ' rather than 'CLERK'). The change to the SQL using RTRIM will stop the optimizer from using indexes - my suggested change would be run an update statement first to remove the extra spaces. There is a function called 'dump' that can be applied to returned column (e.g. dump(job)) that can help in these situations: it shows the actual size and internal representation of the data, which would have immediately shown that the returned data was too long (10 characters for 'CLERK     ' v 5 characters for 'CLERK')

rdfield