Text/Varchar performance...

They are essentially the same. Note that you can have varchar without length
(well, up to about a gigabyte or so after compression), and you can have
varchar with a length well above 255 (say, 100000).

/* Steinar */

Cristian,
TEXT, VARCHAR, and CHAR use the same underlying storage mechanism. This
means that TEXT is actually the "fastest" since it doesn't check length or
space-pad. However, that's unlikely to affect you unless you've millions
of records; you should use the type which makes sense given your
application.

For "large text fields" I always use TEXT. BTW, in PostgreSQL VARCHAR is
not limited to 255; I think we support up to 1GB of text or something
preposterous.

Dear Cristian,

If you need to index the field, you must know that it limit the length up to
1000 bytes. So if you need to index the field you must limit the field type,
ex: varchar(250), than you can index the field and you can gain better
perfomance in searching base on the fields, because the search uses the
index you have been created.
If you do not need to index the field, you can use the text field. Because
text field can store data up to 4 Gbytes.

Regards,
ahmad fajar

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
On Behalf Of Cristian Prieto
Sent: Kamis, 06 Oktober 2005 1:22
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: [PERFORM] Text/Varchar performance...

Hello, just a little question, It's preferable to use Text Fields or
varchar(255) fields in a table? Are there any performance differences in the
use of any of them?

Thanks a lot for your answer!

That really depends on the queries. An index will help some queries (notably
<, = or > comparisons, or LIKE 'foo%' with the C locale), but definitely not
all (it will help you nothing for LIKE '%foo%').
So can varchar.

/* Steinar */