char vs varchar in testcases

Hi everybody,

I've been reviewing each test case and I've bumped into an issue wrt char
ans varchar in the table definitions. Take D010 [1].  "ISO 3166" as a
datatype of CHAR (1), however the data that is inserted consists of only 2
characters. Therefore the result of querying on this table (select "ISO
3166" from "Country Code") is a string of 10 characters long where the
first 2 characters is the country code that was inserted and the rest has
been padded with white space. This is the case at least in SQL Server. It
seems to be the case in Oracle [2]. I do not see in Section 10.2 in the
R2RML spec [3] anything that says that the padded white spaces should be
eliminated (or is there and it's simply monday morning and I can't seem to
read/find it).

Therefore, the DM (and I'm guessing subsequently) and R2RML results should
include the extra whitespaces, or simply change the test cases to use
VARCHAR.

Btw, what was the intention of using CHAR instead of VARCHAR in the first
place?

Thanks!

[1]
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/test-cases/#D010-1table1primarykey3colums3rows
[2]
http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:1542606219593
[3] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/r2rml/#natural-mapping

Juan Sequeda
+1-575-SEQ-UEDA
www.juansequeda.com