> On Nov 12, 2019, at 10:44 PM, Richard Damon rich...@damon-family.org > [firebird-support] <firebird-support@yahoogroups.com> wrote: > >> 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.
In Firebird all records are compressed on disk. > > 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 > > > > ------------------------------------ > Posted by: Richard Damon <rich...@damon-family.org> > ------------------------------------ > > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > > Visit http://www.firebirdsql.org and click the Documentation item > on the main (top) menu. Try FAQ and other links from the left-side menu > there. > > Also search the knowledgebases at > http://www.ibphoenix.com/resources/documents/ > > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > ------------------------------------ > > Yahoo Groups Links > > >
