Odd Behavior

This was originally posted on DBForums.com, so here is the link:
http://www.dbforums.com/showthread.php?t=1614086

Since some of the Microsoft staff come around here occasionally, I figured I should at least link to it here. This is the gist of the problem, though. I was asked to come up with a script to create all required data directories in case an emergency was declared, and someone had to rebuild one of our database servers. Most of you are probably thinking of hitting up the sysaltfiles table about now, but this will turn into a cautionary tale. Try it if you dare. The one requirement is that you install the data for SQL Server in a non-standard directory that has a short path (such as C:MSSQL8, instead of the whole C:Program files...).

What I am unclear on is whether this is a problem in the reverse function, the r(l)trim function, or the fixed-width datatype. I have confirmed that transferring the data to a temp table did not eliminate the...oddity.


select filename
from master..sysaltfiles
where dbid = 2
go
select reverse(rtrim(filename)), filename
from sysaltfiles
where dbid = 2
go
select reverse(rtrim(filename))
from sysaltfiles
where dbid = 2


I have also had two independent DBAs confirm this oddity exists, so this should be relatively easy to replicate.