More important is that if you have a trailing space in one row and not in the other, you can't find equality in your SQL

I would qualify that statement and say that it is true for certain database systems (and Oracle in particular). For Sybase trailing whitespace is not significant: either the column is of type char(), in which case it is fixed width and is always padded with whitespace, or it is of type varchar(), in which case trailing whitespace is ignored (although inseting a zero-length string will be converted to a single whitespace).

Michael