On 11/12/19 12:38 PM, cte...@gmail.com [firebird-support] wrote: > > > What are the trade-offs of CHAR vs. VARCHAR? I know that VARCHAR > consumes less space. Anything thing else (are VARCHAR searches slower)? > In some implementations of SQL (I don't know if firebird is one of them), a row without any variable length items (like VARCHAR) and thus of fixed length could be stored in a somewhat optimized way making its access somewhat faster because all the records were the same size.
VARCHAR also doesn't always take less space, as very short CHAR fields can be smaller than the overhead of a VARCHAR, and if the CHAR field is storing a value that is always the same length (like maybe a hash code) the overhead of VARCHAR is just wasted. -- Richard Damon
