Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Data Management:
DataServer for ODBC

BEGINS function

This section is specific to DB2 data sources.

With one exception, DB2 considers all zero-length character strings as equal to a single space. Therefore, it considers "" and a string of blank spaces to be the same thing.

The exception is as follows: DB2 considers "" and " " to be different when you use them with the BEGINS function. For example, when you use the following statements to access DB2 through the DataServer, the first statement retrieves all records from the customer table, but the second retrieves only those records in which the name begins with a blank character:

FOR EACH customer WHERE name BEGINS "":

FOR EACH customer WHERE name BEGINS " ":