I had the most unexpected and weirdest bug encountered recently, and this is probably the strongest argument to have a consistent testing (and sometimes even development) environment!
In our development environment, we are using a database schema that had two fields, status and reason, as varchar of 2 characters. This means that both fields would be up to 2 characters for storage.
And on the test, staging, production, we actually have the fields defined as char of 2 characters. This means that both fields would be using 2 characters for storage, even if it is a single character.
They are different database products, and me not being a database expert, declined to comment on the difference. Perhaps one of them did support varchar. Or maybe the other was more efficient with char. In any case, it sounded like it would still work. After all, the difference ought to be just on storage.
And I was so wrong. We had weir cases where some comparisons of the returned value failed.
On closer inspection, a value of 'A' from the database was in fact, 'A '! It was padded with whitespaces behind!
That took a while to find out, though fixing was easy. I'm gonna be careful about char from now on.
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