That was back in the mid 1980s.
-Adrian
Jacques Le Roux wrote:
360! Who nowadays works still with such hardware ?
Jacques
From: "Adrian Crum" <adri...@hlmksw.com>
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
