Gary,
those 'silent column specification changes' affect all table types. That feature has caused lots of user questions over years. It is in the TODO to remove that feature from MySQL, because it is not standards compliant. In InnoDB, a reason to use a CHAR column in some cases is to reduce fragmentation if there are lots of updates to that column. A CHAR column takes a fixed space. Silent column specification changes in many cases defeat this optimization which would otherwise be available to users.
Best regards,
Heikki Tuuri
Innobase Oy
Foreign keys, transactions, and row level locking for MySQL
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.................... Hey,
From http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Silent_column_changes.html:
<snip> If any column in a table has a variable length, the entire row becomes variable-length as a result. Therefore, if a table contains any variable-length columns (VARCHAR, TEXT, or BLOB), all CHAR columns longer than three characters are changed to VARCHAR columns. This doesn't affect how you use the columns in any way; in MySQL, VARCHAR is just a different way to store characters. MySQL performs this conversion because it saves space and makes table operations faster. See section 15 MySQL Storage Engines and Table Types. </snip>
Does this affect all table types? I'm curious if this is happening on my InnoDB tables as well. No problems, just curiosity..
Thanks.
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