From: Patrick Questembert Date: December 20 2004 8:53pm Subject: VACHAR and performance List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/dotnet/322 Message-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi all, If I have a text field holding a name between 8 and 32 chars, would it hurt performance if I defined it as VACHAR (as opposed to fixed size at 32)? Would the answer to this question depend on: - whether or not I have an index defined for this column (I think I will define an index for it) - whether I have another VACHAR column for that row in any case (I do), on the grounds that if one column in the table is of variable length, then the total row size is variable anyhow, and performance will not suffer from yet another variable-length column Thanks! Patrick