Question about database design--Varchar2

Our team is looking at how we design our Oracle database tables and discussion options on the best way to design them.

One question we have is about fields that contain description information, where the description might usually be 20-50 characters, but we might occasionally make the description much longer.

We are thinking it might be a good design decision to make all such fields Varchar2 (2000). We settled on 2000 because of problems reading larger fields via ODBC in some cases. What do you think of this design approach? Is there any reason to define the fields with shorter lengths? Can there be any performance issues with these fields being defined as maximum length 2000 when we will typically use much less?

TIA, Matthew Cromer
matthew_at_sdaconsulting.com

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Before you buy. Received on Thu Feb 03 2000 - 08:42:26 CST