Quote:
a blank at the beginning of the value and this char gets trimmed
Back in '96 when I supported Access and SQL Server (for the evil empire itself, I'm sorry to say) both DB engines did this.
Anyway, here's a Microsoft KB article about trailing spaces:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;231830
I'm not sure if the same rules apply to leading spaces.
Keep searching the kb and it may come up:
http://search.microsoft.com/search/results.aspx?st=b&View=en-us&na=82&qu=SQL+varchar+spaces&swc=3