At 11:04 AM -0700 7/27/99, Thimble Smith wrote:
>At 23:10, 19990726, Paul DuBois wrote:
>>At 1:58 AM -0500 7/27/99, David Stack wrote:
>>>Lets say my max record length is 30 characters in size.
>>>
>>>Is there any disadvantage to using the varchar(255) column in the above
>>>situation?
>>
>>None that I can see. About the only difference is that if you store
>>a 31-character string into a VARCHAR(30) column, the last character will
>>be chopped of. With VARCHAR(255), it won't be.
>
>As I understand it, MySQL will allocate 255 bytes in memory to hold
>the values in that column. So it will use slightly more memory when
>performing queries if you use (255) instead of (30).
Ah, that's true. Although it will allocate only one buffer and reuse
it per row (unlike BLOB/TEXT).
--
Paul DuBois, paul@stripped
