want to know the reason for varchar2(4000) limit

Hi all,

Despite several days of digging, I haven't been able to determine the real reason why Oracle limits varchar2 to 4000 chars. I understand that it is desirable to avoid row chaining, but if one designed a tablespace with larger block sizes, wider varchar2 columns wouldn't be likely to cause chaining.

Some competing databases apparently support much wider varchar-style columns -- SQL Server is 8000 bytes (yes, I know that SQL Server has a hard row limit of ~8K bytes per row, but that's a different story), and apparently Informix supports 32K bytes. I haven't been able to dig up a storage reason why Oracle couldn't support wider varchar2. And (almost) everybody hates CLOBs.

Does anybody have a good explanation?

Thanks in advance. Received on Fri Oct 03 2003 - 08:34:37 CDT