Re: Why "VARCHAR" TO "CHAR" automatically when the length less than 4.

[Joseph Cochran]

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 15:25:21 +0200, Martijn Tonies <m.tonies@stripped> wrote:
> > > I have a questions about "varchar columns" change to "CHAR columns"
> > > automatically.

> > See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Silent_column_changes.html
 
> In addition to that - it doesn't really matter as the CHAR datatype
> isn't properly implemented in MySQL and behaves the same as
> the VARCHAR datatype.

I don't believe that is correct. We recently had a very large disk
space problem that was solved when we discovered that a column that
should have been varchar was instead char, and was taking up excess
storage because of it (which a datatype acting like varchar wouldn't
do).

-- Joe