VARCHAR is variable-length. CHAR is fixed length. If your content is a fixed size, you'll get better performance with CHAR. See the MySQL page on CHAR and VARCHAR Types for a detailed explanation (be sure to also read the comments).
varchar [(n | max)] (character varying) Variable-length, non-Unicode string data. n defines the string length and can be a value from 1 through 8,000. max indicates that the maximum storage size is 2^31-1 bytes (2 GB). The storage size is the actual length of the data entered + 2 bytes.
27 The main difference between Varchar(n) and nvarchar(n) is: Varchar ( Variable-length, non-Unicode character data) size is upto 8000. It is a variable length data type Used to store non-Unicode characters Occupies 1 byte of space for each character Nvarchar: Variable-length Unicode character data. It is a variable-length data type
What's the difference between the text data type and the character varying (varchar) data types? According to the documentation If character varying is used without length specifier, the type ac...
I have variable length character data and want to store in SQL Server (2005) database. I want to learn some best practices about how to choose TEXT SQL type or choose VARCHAR SQL type, pros and con...
VARCHAR is reserved by Oracle to support distinction between NULL and an empty string in the future, as ANSI standard prescribes. VARCHAR2 does not distinguish between a NULL and an empty string, and never will.
1 char and varchar actually becomes irrelevant if you have just 1 variable length field in your table, like a varchar or text. Mysql will automatically change all char to varchar. The fixed length/size record can give you extra performance, but you can't use any variable length field types.
Possible values are 1-255. But what are its advantages if you use VARCHAR (255) that is the maximum instead of VARCHAR (20)? As far as I know, the size of the entries depends only on the real length of the inserted string. size (bytes) = length+1 So if you have the word "Example" in a VARCHAR (255) field, it would have 8 bytes.
The effective maximum length of a VARCHAR in MySQL 5.0.3 and later is subject to the maximum row size (65,535 bytes, which is shared among all columns) and the character set used. However, note that the limit is lower if you use a multi-byte character set like utf8 or utf8mb4. Use TEXT types in order to overcome row size limit.
