"Uwe C. Schroeder" <uwe@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Thursday 30 March 2006 21:27, Tom Lane wrote: >> My own take on this is that you should "say what you mean". If you do >> not have a clear application-oriented reason for specifying a particular >> limit N in varchar(N), you have no business choosing a random value of N >> instead. Use text, instead of making up an N. > Tom, good point. However, if you design an application that at one point > _might_ need to be run on something else than postgres (say oracle or DB2), > your're way better off with a varchar than text. Well, if you are looking for the lowest-common-denominator textual column datatype, then varchar(255) is probably it ... I think even Bill Gates would feel ashamed to sell a database that could not handle that. But my reading of the OP's question was about whether there's a usefully large value of N for which every available DB will take "varchar(N)". I'm not real sure what the practical limit of N is in that question, other than being pretty confident that Postgres isn't holding down last place. Comments anyone? regards, tom lane
