On Wed, 2009-01-07 at 10:49 +0000, Richard Heyes wrote: > >> 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. > > It is a small amount of space. Perhaps it was necessary in the days > when 1Gb Hdds were a luxury, but those days are long gone. In the > example you gave you're still only wasting approx 1 GB. Hardly a lot > these days when you consider you buy a consumer 500Gb Hdd for £50. That's for a single table. Now add another 20 to 50 tables depending on the database. If you want to throw away money go ahead, but I don't know too many clients that want to waste 10 gigs of mostly padded space. Cheers, Rob. -- http://www.interjinn.com Application and Templating Framework for PHP -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php