Sysdtslog90, Message Field And My Unicode Ignorance

Sorry to be an ignorant American here, but I'm having a challenge I just can't seem to wrap my head around.

I am attempting to make a nice query for a report that will show how our SSIS jobs are doing. All my packages use the native SQL Server logging capability. The table is sysdtslog90 and it stores the message to a field called 'message' (crazy, I know) with a datatype of nvarchar(4096).

The challenge I'm having is that I'd like to grab all lines where my message is X. The following queries will return no results. The first is me typing in the message I see in the window, the second is copying the value and pasting it in. I know there are instances where that message exists, sadly, in the log table.




Code Snippet

SELECT

L.*

FROM

sysdtslog90 L

WHERE

L.message = N'A commit failed.'


SELECT

L.*

FROM

sysdtslog90 L

WHERE

L.message = N'A commit failed. '





If I were to change that clause out to a like, it'd work just fine. Is that the appropriate way to work with unicode literals? It doesn't feel right.




Code Snippet
SELECT
L.*
FROM
sysdtslog90 L
WHERE
L.message LIKE N'A commit failed.%'




I have exported my sysdtslog90 table to a unicode flat file and looked at this message in a hex editor and it looks fine, nothing looked awry. I then opened the file up in SSMS, thinking perhaps it's a silent conversion issue with pasting, but to no avail. Anyone have some guidance for me?