I’ve got a query:

select * from table where table.entity = '->...'

And when this query is run it returns no results. select * from table where table.entity like '->...' does return a result.

At first I thought it was due to some non ascii character (entity is a varchar(40)) so I made a select ascii(substring(#,1)) query and ran through all 40 characters but they worked as expected, no special hidden characters.

The only difference between the = and like cases I can find is that the like case uses a Seq Scan and not an Index Scan when I run explain analyze.

The index is CREATE INDEX table_entity ON public.table USING btree (entity NULLS FIRST, primary_key NULLS FIRST)

The string '->...' has a fairly common to the database prefix, 315 of the 1043 records share the prefix. I’ve notice that this is an issue for all strings that start with ->, and when running this query select * from table ORDER BY entity NULLS FIRST, primary_key NULLS FIRST It seems to ignore the -> and just focus on the values, so it would look like "->","Aaron","->Abagail",... where it’s ordered but just ignoring the ->

Reindexing did not solve the issue.