To BLOB or not to BLOB, that is the question:
Whether to store string in BLOB, or CHAR, or VARCHAR ?

Differences between CHAR and VARCHAR

Many people believe that VARCHAR is better because it stores only actual data, while CHAR is stored in full length. It is not true. In fact, both CHAR and VARCHAR are stored in memory buffer in their full, declared length; when the row is stored on disk, then RLE compression algorithm is used to compress whole row, i.e. CHARs, VARCHARs, INTEGERs, DATEs, etc. all together. So if you want to save space, CHARs are slightly better than VARCHARs (the differenece is that VARCHAR stores string length in two bytes).

So decision whether use CHAR or VARCHAR should be based solely on application's requirements. E.g. store fixed length codes in CHAR, store names in VARCHAR (to allow correct concatenating).

Advantages/disadvantages of BLOBs vs. VARCHARs

All comments in this paragraph referring VARCHAR type are valid for CHAR type too.
Each comment ends with BLOB + or VARCHAR + mark to indicate which data type is better.
Copyright © 2002, 2006 Ivan Prenosil

[Last update - November 2006]