Re: Data Types

Character will use more disk space than varchar so it does make a
difference.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/datatype-character.html

Values of type character are physically padded with spaces to the
specified width n, and are stored and displayed that way. However, the
padding spaces are treated as semantically insignificant. Trailing
spaces are disregarded when comparing two values of type character, and
they will be removed when converting a character value to one of the
other string types. Note that trailing spaces are semantically
significant in character varying and text values.

Jon

________________________________

From: pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
[mailto:pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Mike Gould
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 1:01 PM
To: pgsql-general General
Subject: [GENERAL] Data Types

We are converting our system from using Sybase's SQL Anywhere 10 to
PostGres 8.3. In SQL Anywhere there technically isn't any difference in
how a char and varchar is stored. They are all an array of char[1]. So
we always just defined everything as a char since right truncation is
the default.

In PostGres though if we are using a character type column to search
should we define that as a varchar or a char or does it make any
difference?

Best Regards

Michael Gould
Intermodal Software Solutions, LLC.