Differene between 2 where conditions which looks similar - sql

Question

My mind is blind when I see those 2 where conditions and I can't understand what's the difference.
Can someone explain me? First returns 273 records and the second one returns 93. I thought they should return the same records.
1st
s.value LIKE '%One Travel%'
OR s.value LIKE '%One RSA%'
OR s.value LIKE '%One Other%'
OR s.value LIKE '%GP&U%'
OR s.value = ' '
2nd
s.value LIKE (
'%One Travel%'
,'%One RSA%'
,'%One Other%'
,'%GP&U%'
, ' ')

Answer 1

I don't know H2 at all, but I assume the second query evaluates to:
s.value LIKE '%One Travel%'
OR s.value LIKE '%One RSA%'
OR s.value LIKE '%One Other%'
OR s.value LIKE '%GP&U%'
OR s.value LIKE ' '
So you're left with the difference between s.value = ' ' and s.value LIKE ' '. Apparently H2 follows ANSI SQL, and the ANSI standard ignores trailing spaces in comparisons (actually the strings to be compared are padded with spaces till they are the same length). So s.value = ' ' returns TRUE for ' ', but also for '' and ' '. LIKE doesn't pad spaces to compare, since it is used for pattern matching rather than equality tests. Hence, LIKE ' ' only matches a single space.
In short; your first query returns more rows because rows where value is an empty string or multiple spaces, are also returned. Your second query returns only rows where value is a single space (ignoring the other conditions for simplicity).

Answer 2

LIKE in the second command is not a function, it is actually the same LIKE predicate. But its right-hand argument is specified as a row value.
I guess many DBMS throw an error, but H2 tries to convert all values here to a character string instead, in some rare cases it is useful, but in this case it isn't.
something LIKE (
'%One Travel%'
,'%One RSA%'
,'%One Other%'
,'%GP&U%'
, ' ')`
becomes
something LIKE 'ROW (%One Travel%, %One RSA%, %One Other%, %GP&U%, )'
in recent versions of H2 or
something LIKE '(%One Travel%, %One RSA%, %One Other%, %GP&U%, )'
in older versions (they don't support row values, but they treat such expressions as non-standard arrays).
Both expressions are meaningless. You need to use the first command with multiple OR conditions. Alternatively you can use a complex regular expression with non-standard REGEXP operator (with similar to LIKE syntax) or with also non-standard REGEXP_LIKE function.
Actually VALUE is a keyword, so both these commands cannot be executed by H2 (at least by its recent versions), but I assume it was just a replacement of a real column name.