>Not quite it. I want to pad with nothing. It seems that the other guy (working in powerbuilder and sybase's SQL anywhere) is kinda working with SET ANSI ON -- that is to say, "CERT " # "CERT" so I need to only write the first four characters... I think its an ODBC setting or something, at least I hope there is something like that.

You may call stored prosedure which will use SUBSTRING function (I guess Sybase and SQL-Server both use identical functions) to force left characters only, though I have no idea how Sybase actually stores data.