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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: Jonathan Gennick
INET: jonathan_at_gennick.com
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