Re: White space compression in Oracle

Marc,

There are subtle differences between CHAR and VARCHAR2 when it comes to comparison semantics as CHAR comparisons are blank padded, which VARCHAR2 are not.  

Thanks, Bjørn.

Marc Perkowitz wrote:         

  Beth,
  Actually, varchar2 is char with the trailing spaces removed.  What's the difficulty with switching to varchar2?  Does RDB regenerate the white spaces when retrieving the data or something?    Generally, everyone uses varchar2 in Oracle.
 

  Marc Perkowitz
Senior Consultant
TWJ Consulting, LLC
 

  847-256-8866 x15
  www.twjconsulting.com                  

• Original Message -----

From:
Seefelt, Beth

To:
Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

      
      
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 12:48      PM
      
Subject: White space compression in      Oracle
      
      

      Hi everyone,
      I hope this isn't a silly question,
but is there      any way to make Oracle compress white space in tables.
      I come from an RDB environment, and
when you have      a char(x) field in RDB, you can set the compression attribute
on the table      and any trailing white space in the char(x) column is compressed.
      I've found when moving some tables with
long char      fields to Oracle, the tables take up much more space, I suspect
because      Oracle is not compressing trailing spaces.
      Because of other constraints, I'm not
able to      change the fields to varchar2.
      Thanks for your help,
      Beth