Hi Sergey,

I am investigating on the COLLATE ones.

On my SQL Query connect to SQL 2K Developer SP3 i have:

f1         lf1         
---------- ----------- 
           6 


f1         lf1         
---------- ----------- 
	   pippo 


f1         lf1         
---------- ----------- 
pippo     6 

Note: SQL 2K Developer SP3 and databases is set to
COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN

Fabio