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What's the difference between VARCHAR and CHAR?
what is the difference between CHAR and VARCHAR.
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What's the difference between CHAR and VARCHAR? The short answer is: VARCHAR is variable length, while CHAR is fixed length. CHAR is a fixed length string data type, so any remaining space in the field is padded with blanks.
CHAR is a fixed length field; VARCHAR is a variable length field. If you are storing strings with a wildly variable length such as names, then use a VARCHAR, if the length is always the same, then use a CHAR because it is slightly more size-efficient, and also slightly faster.
Because of the fixed field lengths, data is pulled straight from the column without doing any data manipulation and index lookups against varchar are slower than that of char fields. CHAR is better than VARCHAR performance wise, however, it takes unnecessary memory space when the data does not have a fixed-length.
If you use char or varchar, we recommend to: Use char when the sizes of the column data entries are consistent. Use varchar when the sizes of the column data entries vary considerably. Use varchar(max) when the sizes of the column data entries vary considerably, and the string length might exceed 8,000 bytes.
A CHAR field is a fixed length, and VARCHAR is a variable length field.
This means that the storage requirements are different - a CHAR always takes the same amount of space regardless of what you store, whereas the storage requirements for a VARCHAR vary depending on the specific string stored.
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