Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@dcc.uchile.cl> writes:
> The difference you cite is for char(N) fields, which are always padded
> with blanks to fill the N chars.
And, again, that's N logical *characters*, not bytes.
We used to have some attempts at optimizing on the assumption that
char(n) fields were physically fixed-width, but we gave it up as a
bad job several major releases back ... it was never more than a
very marginal optimization anyway ...
regards, tom lane