What does varchar (255) mean?

Open
#35 9 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
sql
Domain
databases

Research direction

The issue names no repository file, test, or entry point. Start by reviewing the nine-comment discussion and determine whether the intended outcome is documentation or a general answer; done would be a clear explanation of what VARCHAR(255) means across SQL databases.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

In SQL you declare a text value by telling the system how much space to reserve for it.

I understand why that was necessary 50 years ago, but I can't imagine today's SQL databases don't use some kind of heap.

When I say a value is varchar (255) does that mean in every case it takes up 255 chars in the database?

Dominant language
HTML
Stars
134
Forks
10
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from scripting/Scripting-News

All issues in scripting/Scripting-News

Similar issues

More Databases issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.