varchar

A varchar or Variable Character Field is a set of character data of indeterminate length. The term varchar refers to a data type of a field (or column) in a database management system which can hold letters and numbers. Varchar fields can be of any size up to a limit, which varies by databases: an Oracle 9i database has a limit of 4000 bytes, a MySQL database has a limit of 65,535 bytes (for the entire row) and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 has a limit of 8000 characters (unless varchar(max) is used, which has a maximum storage capacity of 2 gigabytes).

References

CHAR and VARCHAR documentation for Microsoft SQL Server 2008
VARCHAR documentation for Apache Derby
CHAR and VARCHAR documentation for MySQL 5.1
CHAR and VARCHAR documentation for IBM Informix

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, November 04, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.