From: Martijn Tonies
Date: November 11 2009 8:39am
Subject: Re: storage difference in VARCHAR(size)?
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/219329
Message-Id: <007e01ca62aa$6a8bf540$1401a8c0@martijnws>
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>You have stumbled across the secret.  No, there is no difference at
>all as the calculations suggested here confirm.
>
>http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/storage-requirements.html

Note: as you can see in the above, CHAR data DOES take up room for it's
full size, stupidly enough.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 6:37 PM, Waynn Lue <waynnlue@stripped> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I was building a table for storing email addresses today and ran into an
> issue that I couldn't find an answer for using Google. If I declare the
> column as a VARCHAR (this is an InnoDB table), does it matter what size I
> declare it as if it's between 1 and 255? I know there's an extra byte of
> storage once it goes above 255 because of the length, but is there a 
> storage
> difference between VARCHAR(100) and VARCHAR(255)? Obviously there's a
> functional difference in what gets cut off when I try to store into that
> table, but is that the only difference?

With regards,

Martijn Tonies
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com

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