Re: Help: VARCHAR2

Michael A McKenney <mckennem_at_ncr.disa.mil> wrote:

>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?

VARCHAR (VARCHAR2) is a highly standard storage form in RDBMS systems. The overhead of storing a fixed-length area that contains nothing is much greater than processing a variable-length column. I/O times for reading the big NOTHINGs are far greater than processing times to handle variable length data.

Me Received on Fri Nov 10 1995 - 00:00:00 CET