I'm creating my own table of metadata about other tables in my
database. As such, one column will be the names of those other tables,
and the maximum length of the data in this column would be the allowed
length of an identifier. So one possible data type for this column
would be 'varchar(NAMEDATALEN - 1)'.
However, it would seem to be much simpler to use the special character
type 'name', except that the documentation in section 8.3 warns that
"The 'name' type exists only for storage of identifiers in the
internal system catalogs and is not intended for use by the general
user. "
Is there any real harm in using 'name', though, other than lack of
portability?
-- Andy
