Does anyone think this is the correct behavior? adaps_db=# select * from upc_usage order by 1 ; usage ---------- 53E ABC CYPHER _GENERAL H66 HAWK _JOE RSRA S61 S65 S70 S76 S92 XWING (14 rows) It appears to be ignoring the underscore! Database has LATIN1 encoding and was recently migrated from 8.0 to 8.3.