RE: White space compression in Oracle

Note
VARCHAR and CHAR uses different comparison semantics.  With CHAR the shorter one is padded with spaces up to the same length as the longer one and a byte by byte comparison is used.  VARCHAR uses a none padded method.

  <FONT face=Tahoma
  size=2>-----Original Message-----From: Marc Perkowitz   [mailto:mperkowitz_at_twjconsulting.com]Sent: Monday, February 11,   2002 4:40 PMTo: Multiple recipients of list   ORACLE-LSubject: Re: White space compression in   Oracle
  Beth,
  Actually, varchar2 is char with the trailing   spaces removed.  What's the difficulty with switching to varchar2?    Does RDB regenerate the white spaces when retrieving the data or   something?   Generally, everyone uses varchar2 in   Oracle.
   
  Marc PerkowitzSenior ConsultantTWJ
  Consulting, LLC
   
  847-256-8866 x15<A
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• Original Message -----
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  style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black">From:
  <A title=Beth.Seefelt_at_TetleyUSA.com
  href="mailto:Beth.Seefelt_at_TetleyUSA.com">Seefelt, Beth To: <A title=ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com href="mailto:ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com">Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 12:48 PM Subject: White space compression in Oracle
  <FONT face=Arial
  size=2> Hi everyone, I hope this isn't a silly question, but is there any way to make Oracle compress white space in tables. I come from an RDB environment, and when you have a char(x) field in RDB, you can set the compression attribute on the table and any trailing white space in the char(x) column is compressed. I've found when moving some tables with long char fields to Oracle, the tables take up much more space, I suspect because Oracle is not compressing trailing spaces. Because of other constraints, I'm not able to change the fields to varchar2. Thanks for your help, Beth