From: James Moore
Date: December 20 2004 9:38pm
Subject: RE: VACHAR and performance
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AFAIK, the question is whether or not you have any VARCHAR rows in a table.
If you do, you're going to take a performance hit.  I've heard about 25%
slower, but that was back in 3.X, and was specific to MyISAM tables.  Once
you have one, you might as well have several.  (Or, to put it another way,
you should eliminate all VARCHAR columns, depending on your size/speed
tradeoffs.)

 - James