Re: Help, my developers are killing me with varchar2(4000)
From: gym dot scuba dot kennedy at gmail <kennedyii_at_verizon.net>
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:50:55 GMT
Message-ID: <jCCjk.437$rb5.381@trnddc04>
> and wants me to promote them to QA. I took a look at them, and nearly
> every column is varchar2(4000). I am pretty sure this is overkill for
> most of them. I know it takes up as much room as the data, but I just
> don't like this design philosophy. Does anyone have any references/
> urls saying this is a bad idea to design tables like this? It has been
> my experience that you get bad data by allowing columns to contain
> more data then what it should really hold.
> Thanks in advance,
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:50:55 GMT
Message-ID: <jCCjk.437$rb5.381@trnddc04>
<RogBaker_at_gmail.com> wrote in message
news:fca4ed5e-1e56-4703-82fc-91ae3a35b1d1_at_d1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
>I have a developer that created some tables in a development instnace
> and wants me to promote them to QA. I took a look at them, and nearly
> every column is varchar2(4000). I am pretty sure this is overkill for
> most of them. I know it takes up as much room as the data, but I just
> don't like this design philosophy. Does anyone have any references/
> urls saying this is a bad idea to design tables like this? It has been
> my experience that you get bad data by allowing columns to contain
> more data then what it should really hold.
> Thanks in advance,
In another part of the company I work for they use Mysql and have committed the same sins. So mysql stores data as you would expect, if you have 5 bytes in a varchar2(4000) column it takes close to 5 bytes on disk. However, once you read it off disk mysql expands the size to the size defined for the column. and they wonder why they have memory issues and perfornamce issues. (glad Oracle doesn't do that) Jim Received on Tue Jul 29 2008 - 05:50:55 CDT