Ian wrote:

> There is the additional storage overhead as you mention, plus this can
> lead to performance issues with row overflows and/or page reorgs.

This is certainly true, but you also have to keep in mind that more short
VARCHARs might fit on a page than (padded) CHAR values. So you could
easily have a performance benefit because less pages need to be loaded to
satisfy a query.

--
Knut Stolze
Information Integration Development
IBM Germany / University of Jena