varchar

A varchar or Variable Character Field is a set of character data of indeterminate length. The term varchar refers to a data of a field (or column) in a database management system. Varchar fields can be of any size up to a limit, which varies by databases: an Oracle 9i database has a limit of 4000 bytes, a MySQL database has a limit of 65,535 bytes (for the entire row) and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 has a limit of 8000 bytes (unless varchar(max) is used, which has a maximum storage capacity of 2 gigabytes).

References

• CHAR and VARCHAR documentation for Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
• VARCHAR documentation for Apache Derby.
• CHAR and VARCHAR documentation for MySQL 5.1.
• CHAR and VARCHAR documentation for IBM_Informix.