[snip] > If that makes a difference then I'd guess you have one of two things: > 1. A corrupt index (check the REINDEX command) > 2. (perhaps more likely) Some localisation issues. > What encoding/locale settings are you using? Based on the 3rd query of the OP, where the direct comparison results in "true" for all the rows which matched the "like", I would exclude the localisation issues variant... unless = is not equals in all cases ;-) Cheers, Csaba.