Re: VARCHAR length

"Karsten Farell" <kfarrell_at_medimpact.com> wrote in message news:eaHo9.1596$i17.195196079_at_newssvr13.news.prodigy.com...
> 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.
>

Having just attended an Oracle architecture class, that was definitely not covered. Received on Tue Oct 08 2002 - 18:05:35 CDT