Symptoms
When you use Microsoft OLE DB Provider (MSDAORA) or the OLE DB .NET Data Provider for Oracle, if you use a LIKE statement to search fixed-length character types, Oracle does not find any rows if their padding is different.
Resolution
If you type a value into a fixed-length field that is shorter than the length of that field, the value is padded with trailing spaces to fill the fixed length. When Oracle matches values for fixed-length fields, it matches the entire length of the string, including any trailing spaces.
NOTE: This behavior is not specific to ADO.NET and also occurs when you use Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO).