Re: RE: Get max length of data for a column

Morning Mike,

> Thanks for that clarification. To be honest, we don't really use CHAR here
> anymore, which is why I've either forgotten that important piece of
> information, or (worse) never knew it.
Years ago, I wrote a "data obfuscation" routine with simply replaced 
certain columns with random data generated by DBMS_RANDOM. All my CHAR 
columns ended up being exactly the defined length! That's when I noticed 
it. I ended up using VSIZE() to get the length of the TRIM()med CHAR 
columns. Sort of stuck in my "cache" since then.


> Out of interest, is there any reason
> why one would want to use CHAR rather than VARCHAR?
I'm not sure. I use them occasionally myself. Just for internal space 
saving. A VARCHAR2 has a hidden size setting. If the column is 100 long 
and you store 40 in it, there's a counter internally that says "this is 
how long the data is". Not a great reason, but if you have flag columns 
- gender, for example, that are only one character long, you don't need 
the counter internally.

There are probably other good reasons for using CHAR, but I can't think 
of any off hand. Maybe Bert knows - he knows lots of good stuff!


-- 
Cheers,
Norm. [TeamT]


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