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

Nathan Rixham wrote: > Richard Heyes wrote: >>>> Also I could be missing >>>> something, but I can't see the advantage in VARCHAR since space is not >>>> really a concern these days. >>> char is fixed length and padded. If you don't fill up the space, the >>> db does it for you (even though it seems it's internal only). >>> >>> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/char.html >>> >>> When CHAR values are stored, they are right-padded with spaces to the >>> specified length. When CHAR values are retrieved, trailing spaces are >>> removed. >> >> So where's the advantage of VARCHAR ? >> > > storage size richard, as if you use char(100) then a string(4) will > still use the space of string(100); whereas with varchar(100) it's > only take up it's real space of string(4). > > it' may seem like a small amount of space but when you have 8 > char(255) columns in a table with 10 million rows you'd noticed the > difference considerably. Actually string(4) in a varchar(100) will take up 5 bytes, but that's still better than 100. Thank you, Micah Gersten onShore Networks Internal Developer http://www.onshore.com