there may be an a unimportant performance penality for varchar, because of filling up and whatever.
But the real reason: as much as I researched, NOBODY stated that varchar2 would be faster or better; but it limits the length. And I spend to much time in working around fixed field lengths in my life; and I saw enough people being frustrated and wasting time, especially for fields like "name". i.E.: in germany the ZIP-code was extended from 4 to 5 digits. Can you imagine HOW MANY applications had to be fixed?
On the other hand I use the "TEXT" type to argue when somebody wants me to port my application to Oracle :) ... "yes, of course. You need Oracle Enterprise Edition because of Table Partitioning; and we need to refactor all text fields so they can deal with Oracles limited VARCHAR2 type, or you simply accept that we will only use the first xxx chars."
Harald
-- GHUM Harald Massa persuadere et programmare Harald Armin Massa Reinsburgstraße 202b 70197 Stuttgart 0173/9409607 - Let's set so double the killer delete select all.