Hugo,

Thank you for this gleaming nugget. Although I'm a developer, not a DBA, I like to know something of what's under the hood with the tools we use. This QOD gave us double our money's worth -- an explicit rtrim() is necessary to fully take advantage of the move to varchar and the clustered index must be rebuilt to free the space used by the old fixed length column definition.

I've never been happier to get an answer wrong than this time -- really learned something valuable.