RE: [PHP] Mysql/php database performance question

> -----Original Message----- > From: Marek Kilimajer [mailto:kilimajer@webglobe.sk] > Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 11:45 AM > To: Matt Schroebel > Cc: Simon Dedeyne; php-general@lists.php.net > Subject: Re: [PHP] Mysql/php database performance question > > > Sure, just tried it (32-bit platform, might be >7 for 64-bits). > I have a feeling it is somewhere in the manual. How'd you try it? I created a 1 column 42 char record in phpMyAdmin. Everytime I add a row, regardless of size the dataspace increases by 42. With a second table, with 1 column varchar(42), each 4-5 char insert resulted in 20 bytes of space (must be some minimum overhead), and a full 42 resulted in 44 bytes of dataspace used. I'm curious here, as it seems the trade off is speed of access with char [and the overhead of removing trailing spaces on each retrieval] vs storage size in varchar [and it's improved strip right spaces on storage only happening once]. That's what the man page I pointed to last time said. There are some examples of truncating data to 4 bytes on that page but no mention of storing char as varchar.