Storing a great many fields in a database

[Bob Sneidar]

Wha?? I thought the whole point to using VARCHAR was that it only used as much space as the actual text needed. What is the difference between TEXT and VARCHAR then? 

Bob


On Jul 16, 2012, at 9:50 AM, Peter Haworth wrote:

> SQLite does have some advantages over other dbs in this area.  Since it
> effectively ignores any length specification, e.g. VARCHAR(100), it only
> stores the number of characters you give it during an INSERT or UPDATE
> operation.  On the other hand VARCHAR(100) on most other SQL dbs will
> allocate enough disk space to store 100 characters even if you only put 1
> character in the column.  The "100" is a constraint that prevents more than
> 100 chars from being put into the column but doesn't affect the storage
> space.