David E Jones wrote:
Yes, I agree... let's leave it all as-is. The number is a limit to the size and has nothing to do with the actual amount of space required to store the field... ie it is a VARCHAR and will only use the space required for the length of the actual value.
Just a little side note - the amount of space used by a VARCHAR field depends upon the hardware and OS platform. I worked on an IBM System 360 where contiguous disk space was allocated in advance for the database. The space required was calculated based on the maximum length the fields would consume, plus the maximum number of records the database would hold. In mini and mainframe computers every effort is made to allocate contiguous disk space in advance - for performance reasons.
-Adrian
