> That's somewhat annoying that it works the way it does, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

> However, the nature of a CHAR(31) column is that it gets blank-padded to

the

> declared width, so the fact that it comes back with trailing blanks
> isn't so surprising.

No it isn't, but from the user point of view, how meta data is stored in the
database does not matter;
what matters is the result.
The JDBC specs say that e.g. getTables -> "TABLE_NAME" should return
the table name, i.e. the name I gave to the table, not a blank
padded-string.

> I'm curious to know if you've worked with other JDBC-driver/DB-engine
> combinations that had different behavior for a CHAR type column (as
> opposed to say VARCHAR).

I worked with other dbs, and I never had problems with DatabaseMetaData.
If I declare a field as CHAR(31), I expect to get a padded string, but if I
query for the column name I expect to get exactly the real name, because it
is meta data.
BTW, this problem does not exist with InterClient.

Massimo