Help: VARCHAR2

I've been reading alot of documentation that seems to reflect that varchar2 is the default character representation for Oracle. I'm coming from a DB2 world where varchar is something to stay away from except in very restricted cases where disk space is extremely constrained. I/O constraints and systems performance are my more normal concerns. It would seem to me that any kind of varchar implementation would necessarily require at least twice the I/O overhead for screen presentation and indexing than a similar char implementation. Comments? Received on Thu Nov 09 1995 - 00:00:00 CET