char vs. varchar in a data warehouse

From: YTTRI Lisa <lisa.yttri_at_cnh.com>
Date: Wed, 05 Jun 2002 07:53:24 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.004750B2.20020605075324@fatcity.com>

Hi -

We are in the process of building a data warehouse and data stores. This will be built on a Sun Solaris (2.8) machine running Oracle 9i R1. Estimates are approximately 180GB.

The developers have defined most of their small character fields as varchar2 - even the ones of size 1! They tell me that if the column does not have a value, they do not want to have to deal with a 'space' when manipulating that value.

Does this make sense? Should I be pursuing this further or shouldn't I care as the DBA?

Lisa

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Author: YTTRI Lisa
  INET: lisa.yttri_at_cnh.com

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