Rob Richardson wrote: > The database we install at our customers as part of our > product includes an event_history table. For some reason > lost in the mists of time, the most important field in that > table, the description, is a varchar field specified to be > only 64 characters long. This leads me to a more fundamental > question: why specify the length of a varchar field at all? > Is there a big difference between the amount of disk space > taken up by "abc" stored in a varchar(64) field and stored in > a varchar field? How much space does an unspecified-length > varchar field take up? Are there other reasons to use > varchar(64) instead of varchar? You can't have "varchar" without a length in parentheses, as far as I know. But you can use "text" which is essentially the same thing. I can think of two reasons to use varchar(n) instead of text: - you deliberately want to limit the amount of characters. - you want to index the column (indexes have a maximum row size). It is not a performance issue, however, and there is no wasted space either. Yours, Laurenz Albe -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
