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RE: char is going away?

From: DENNIS WILLIAMS <DWILLIAMS_at_LIFETOUCH.COM>
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 08:49:24 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.005D9719.20031210084924@fatcity.com>


Jonathan

   My understanding is that VARCHAR2 is not even a SQL standard, and some databases don't handle VARCHAR very efficiently, so if you are trying to sell a product that can adapt to several databases besides Oracle, you might stick to CHAR.

   If your application is COBOL-based, using CHAR simplifies things quite a bit. Especially if you sell your application to many sites that want to use Oracle underneath but don't have an Oracle DBA, at least not initially. Yeah it wastes a bit of disk space.

Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 10:35 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Wednesday, December 10, 2003, 11:09:27 AM, Gene Gurevich (gurelei_at_yahoo.com) wrote:

GG> Someone told me that Oracle is planning to retire char
GG> variable and therefore they need to be replaced by
GG> varchar2. Has anyone heard anything about it?

I've not heard anything like this. I'm skeptical that it's true. The ANSI standard defines a fixed-length type analogous to CHAR, so phasing out CHAR would seem to take Oracle in a direction *away* from the standard, and that seems out-of-character. Lately, Oracle seems to have emphasized compliance with the SQL standard.

Would it even make sense to dispense with CHAR? I admit, I've never found it too useful, but I'm sure there are applications that use it. Any phase-out would surely need to take place over a very long period of time.

What good reasons might an application have to use and depend on CHAR variables?

Best regards,

Jonathan Gennick --- Brighten the corner where you are http://Gennick.com * 906.387.1698 * mailto:jonathan@gennick.com

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Author: DENNIS WILLIAMS
  INET: DWILLIAMS_at_LIFETOUCH.COM
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