>
> Once upon a time, in the days of 80-column punch cards and no
> variable-length character encodings, there were databases that could
> handle fixed-width character fields a bit faster than variable-width.
> That doesn't apply to Postgres. There is no, none, nada performance
> advantage to char(n), and you should never use it unless your
> application data clearly demands a specific field width.
I still often use char(n) a lot, mainly for documentation purposes. If a
column will only ever hold exactly a fixed length string (status codes
and stuff), it looks better in the datamodel to use char(n) IMHO.
Tim