Comment 2 for bug 614380

The problem exists for char(3), char(5), char(6), and char(7) and for varchar(1) through varchar(7) columns. This will be fixed in the 1.5.4 patch release.

The bug is in cpimport where the extent map min and max values are getting set incorrectly for certain values.

A work arounds are available:
1. Use char(4) instead of char(3) or varchar(2-4).
     Use char(8) instead of char(5-7) and varchar(5-8).
     The bytes stored on disk will be the same with this work around.
or...
2. Use the editem utility to clear the min and max values for the column. This option has a very quick run time, likely sub second. Here is a Linux command that will do this for the test_table.test_field column described in the example.
/usr/local/Calpont/bin/editem -c `idbmysql calpontsys -e "select objectid from syscolumn where columnname='test_field' and tablename='test_table';" | grep -v objectid`
or...
3. Update the column setting the value to itself. This may be a good solution if you have a few thousand rows in the table. #2 will be much faster if you are dealing with a large number of rows.
Ex:
update test_table set test_field=test_field;