MySQL Data Types - VARCHAR

Versions: MySQL 5.x, 4.x and 3.23

MySQL - VARCHAR
Syntax	VARCHAR(n) [CHARACTER SET charset \| BINARY \| ASCII \| UNICODE ] [COLLATE collate]
Data	Variable-length character data, single-byte and multibyte character sets
Parameters	n is the maximum number of characters, optional. CHARACTER SET specifies the character set, COLLATE specifies a collation for the character set. ASCII is equal to CHARACTER SET latin1, UNICODE is equal to CHARACTER SET ucs2, BINARY is equal to specifying the binary collation
Range	1 ⇐ n ⇐ 65535/charsize (65535 is the maximum row size shared among all columns)
Default	n is mandatory
Padding	Not right-padded with spaces to n
Trailing Spaces	Not removed when the value is stored and retrieved. But trailing spaces are insignificant in comparisons, primary and unique keys
Error Handling	Exceeding data truncated and a warning is generated if strict SQL mode is not enabled, otherwise in case of non-space characters truncation, an error is raised If strict SQL mode is not enabled, a VARCHAR column with a length greater than 65535 is converted to TEXT, otherwise an error is generated
Storage Size	Actual entry length
Internals	If CHARACTER SET binary is specified, it is automatically converted to the VARBINARY data type without warning
Version Differences	MySQL 4.1 and later - CHARACTER SET and COLLATE options are available. MySQL 4.0.2 and earlier - 1 ⇐ n ⇐ 255
Synonyms	CHAR VARYING, CHARACTER VARYING
Standards	ANSI SQL

MySQL VARCHAR - Equivalents in Other Databases

Database	Data Type and Conversion
Oracle	VARCHAR2(n), 1 ⇐ n ⇐ 4000/charsize
SQL Server	VARCHAR(n \| max), 1 ⇐ n ⇐ 8000, 2G if max is specified
PostgreSQL	VARCHAR(n), 1 ⇐ n ⇐ 1G
Sybase ASE	VARCHAR(n), 1 ⇐ n ⇐ pagesize (2K, 4K, 8K or 16K)
Informix	VARCHAR(n,r), 1 ⇐ n ⇐ 255, LVARCHAR(n), 1 ⇐ n ⇐ 32739
HP Neoview	VARCHAR(n), 1 ⇐ n ⇐ (32708 - size of other columns)
Ingres	VARCHAR(n), 1 ⇐ n ⇐ 32000; TEXT(n), 1 ⇐ n ⇐ 32000

Related Data Types in MySQL

Data Types
Fixed-length character data	CHAR(n)	NCHAR(n)
Variable-length character data	NVARCHAR(n)	TINYTEXT	TEXT	MEDIUMTEXT
Character large objects	LONGTEXT

All Data Types

Oracle

SQL Server

IBM DB2

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Sybase ASE

Sybase ASA

Informix DS

Teradata

HP Neoview

Interbase/Firebird

Ingres