Unless your application requires a 30 character limit at the logical
level, use text.
Robert Treat
On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 17:08, Kris wrote:
> Hello all. I am designing a database that will could potentially grow to
> have millions of tuples associated with it. My thought is that because I
> will likely have many updates/inserts/deletes occurring I should set each
> column that requires text to a static ammount (ie using char(30) instead of
> text). However, this looks to be a double edged sword, since selecting from
> the db is my largest concern (with updates a very close second). When I
> pull these values back out of the db, it seems I am going to have to trim
> each returned value (when I pull a ten character string out of this field,
> it returns the 10 char string as well as 20 whitespaces.). I am trying to
> assign a weight to each of these scenarios and figure out which is the
> lesser of the two evils. If anyone has a suggestion of how I may circumvent
> this issue or which possibility may work best, it would be greatly
> appreciated. Thanks
>