Mysql what is the difference between char and varchar

Learn more. Asked 11 years, 1 month ago. Active 11 years, 1 month ago. Viewed 66k times. Community Bot 1 1 1 silver badge. Sadly, yes, we do not like duplicates. It doesn't need to be a copy to be duplicate.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Mark Byers Mark Byers k gold badges silver badges bronze badges. So why do we need to use CHAR? View all vote's. No Down Vote. The char is a fixed-length character data type, the varchar is a variable-length character data type. No Vote. No Up Vote. Pradeep 16 Dec Char data type fixed length memory allocated every input but varchar type memory allocated based on the input characters. Varchar stores variable length character strings, Char stores fixed length data.

Char is used for only to take characters where as varchar is used for both characters and special characters also Char is fixed lenght varchar is variable length. Divya 30 Aug char size : Holds a fixed length string specified in parenthesis. If,you use char 30 but enter a character of 20 characters then remainig 10 characters will be padded with space The main drawback is you have to decide initially how many charachter will your data type take to avoid space loss..

Hence, on run time only that amount of memory is allocated as there are no. Its used when we are not sure how many characters we need to store data for more details. Hingis 26 Jul char is fixed length data type where as varchar is variable length. Rabi 21 Jul char is fixed size and it only takes alphabets. Sarthak 16 Jul char is a data-type of fixed length, whatever you declare. But, varchar is a variable data-type.

CHAR is fixed length. If your content is a fixed size, you'll get better performance with CHAR. CHAR Used to store character string value of fixed length. The maximum no. Uses static memory allocation. Hence, this data type can store values of fixed length. If the length is less than the defined size, the rest is padded with space characters to match the specified length. Furthermore, the maximum number of characters it can store is An example statement is as follows. It creates a table called student.

Moreover, it has two columns, and both of them are capable of storing char values. The syntax is varchar [ n max ]. Here, n denotes the string length in bytes, while max denotes the maximum storage size.

Hence, this data type is capable of storing data of variable length along with 1 or byte length prefix. Unlike in char, there is no padding with any characters.