Re: char is going away?

> What good reasons might an application have to use and
> depend on CHAR variables?

There was a recommendation in Oracle's intro to SQL training materials several years ago, that you can use fixed-len char columns to make sure that your rows never grow once inserted, thus reducing row migration possibility.

But in reality, whoever wrote it, didn't realize that number column size still do vary depending on contents, also a char col takes only one byte when it is NULL, despite it's length definition in data dictionary. Once you insert any data into it, the char as much bytes as required by definition and fills rest with blanks...

Tanel.

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Author: Tanel Poder
  INET: tanel.poder.003_at_mail.ee

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