Howard J. Rogers wrote:
> I hope you're not claiming that CHAR datatypes don't use length bytes?
>
> They do.
>
> Regards
> HJR
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's been quite a while since I attended an
oracle architecture class. As you probably know, training is one of the
first things to go in a shrinking budget ... and new DBAs get trained
before old-timers - as it should be, I suppose, since they have more to
learn. So I haven't heard the lecture since Oracle7 first came out.
Something tells me Oracle just might have done a little work on their db
since then, eh?
I thought the length of a CHAR field was stored in the data dictionary
(since it never changes) and the length of a VARCHAR2 field was stored
in the database row (since it potentially changes). Therefore, the
starting byte position of each CHAR field can be determined at SQL parse
time (if there are no variable-length fields in front of it); but the
starting position of VARCHAR2 fields cannot be determined until the row
is read into the buffer.
Received on Tue Oct 08 2002 - 15:24:42 CDT
