In real-world applications, instead of putting all the padding at the end, you'd usually put the padding in a few spots in the middle of the table. And maybe those ETL devs didn't understand the importance of padding. Whatever it was, there were several places where the data was structured like SOME_USEFUL_FIELD PADDING PADDING PADDING SOME_OTHER_FIELD , and they opted to split it like so: SOME_USEFUL_FIELD PADDING PAD , DING PADDING SOME_OTHER_FIELD . The padding characters got stripped before displaying, so the users never saw them. Instead of paying the contractors to come back and rework the system, the mainframe devs instead were tasked with finding different padding fields they could use, padding fields which wouldn't end up ruining any reports management liked to see.