the LIKE pattern-matching operator, which takes into account trailing spaces. If a unique index consists of a column where trailing pad characters are stripped or ignored, inserts into that column where values differ only by the number of trailing pad characters will result in a duplicate-key error. Examples -------- Trailing spaces: CREATE TABLE strtest (c CHAR(10)); INSERT INTO strtest VALUES('Maria '); SELECT c='Maria',c='Maria ' FROM strtest; +-----------+--------------+ | c='Maria' | c='Maria ' | +-----------+--------------+ | 1 | 1 | +-----------+--------------+ SELECT c LIKE 'Maria',c LIKE 'Maria ' FROM strtest; +----------------+-------------------+ | c LIKE 'Maria' | c LIKE 'Maria ' | +----------------+-------------------+ | 1 | 0 | +----------------+-------------------+ NO PAD Collations ----------------- NO PAD collations regard trailing spaces as normal characters. You can get a list of all NO PAD collations by querying the Information Schema Collations table, for example: SELECT collation_name FROM information_schema.collations WHERE collation_name LIKE "%nopad%"; +------------------------------+ | collation_name | +------------------------------+ | big5_chinese_nopad_ci | | big5_nopad_bin | ... URL: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/char/https://mariadb.com/kb/en/char/