DB design document

[David Merrill]

On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 09:54:44AM -0600, Patrick Spinler wrote:
> David Merrill wrote:
> > 
> > You can't avoid having a limit on text fields, but you can make them
> > very large.
> 
> In short, if you plan on having updatable data, use varchar() columns,
> for which most databases preallocate space in the record.  This means
> some wastage of data storage, but you get a lot of positive performance
> boosts because of it.

I think you have this backwards. varchar means "variable length char",
while 'char' or sometimes 'text' is fixed length. By variable vs fixed
I mean how it is stored on disk, not the constraints on valid entries.

-- 
Dr. David C. Merrill                     http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                dmerrill@lupercalia.net
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org
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