Re: Because you guys/gals/girls/women/insert pc term here are a smart lot

So what I'm taking away from this is that I can index a text column, but that is relatively new. Based on experience with technology I'm going to guess it's not a very efficient index or search function yet. CHAR seems to be well entrenched, and the favorite for any column I may need to search against. I just need to be warry of the size limits and account for them in my program and data entry. Does that seem to be the consensus? "Nathan Rixham" <nrixham@gmail.com> wrote in message news:4963388F.5080707@gmail.com... > chris smith wrote: >>> It may be worth mentioning that, IIRC, CHAR is faster due to the fixed >>> length. If you can make your table use a fixed length row size (ie no >>> variable length columns), it'll be faster. >> >> I'd be interested in seeing tests about this.. I doubt there's any >> difference. > > quote: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/data-size.html > For MyISAM tables, if you do not have any variable-length columns > (VARCHAR, TEXT, or BLOB columns), a fixed-size row format is used. *This > is faster but unfortunately may waste some space.* See Section 13.4.3, > “MyISAM Table Storage Formats”. You can hint that you want to have fixed > length rows even if you have VARCHAR columns with the CREATE TABLE option > ROW_FORMAT=FIXED.