Posted by J.O. Aho on 10/03/75 11:50

strawberry wrote:
> With regards the VARCHAR(1) fields listed above, is there any advantage
> (in terms of performance) of CHAR(1) over VARCHAR(1)? Would anyone do
> it differently - other than normalizing it of course?
>

From the MySQL online manual:

The length of a CHAR column is fixed to the length that you declare when you
create the table. The length can be any value from 0 to 255. When CHAR values
are stored, they are right-padded with spaces to the specified length. When
CHAR values are retrieved, trailing spaces are removed.


So CHAR(50) will always be 50 characters long, while a VARCHAR(50) will be as
long as the string stored, to a max of 50 characters. There are more
differences, for more info you can check
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/char.html


//Aho

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