Character Data Types

Use character data types for storing strings of letters, numbers and symbols.

Syntax

Use this syntax for character data types.

CHAR [ ( max-length ) ]

CHARACTER [ ( max-length ) ]

CHARACTER VARYING [ ( max-length ) ]

VARCHAR [ ( max-length ) ]

UNIQUEIDENTIFIERSTR

Usage

This table describes the character data types.

Character Data Type
Character Data Type	Description
CHAR	Character data of maximum length `max-length` bytes. If `max-length` is omitted, the default is 1. The maximum size allowed is 32KB – 1. See Notes for restrictions on `CHAR` data greater than 255 bytes. See the notes below on character data representation in the database, and on storage of long strings. All `CHAR` values are blank padded up to `max-length`, regardless of whether the `BLANK PADDING` option is specified. When multibyte character strings are held as a `CHAR` type, the maximum length is still in bytes, not characters.
CHARACTER	Same as `CHAR`.
CHARACTER VARYING	Same as `VARCHAR`.
LONG VARCHAR	Arbitrary length character data. The maximum size is limited by the maximum size of the database file (currently 2 gigabytes).
TEXT	This is a user-defined data type. It is implemented as a LONG VARCHAR allowing NULL.
VARCHAR	Same as CHAR, except that no blank padding is added to the storage of these strings, and VARCHAR strings can have a maximum length of (32KB – 1). See Notes for restrictions on VARCHAR data greater than 255 bytes.
UNIQUEIDENTIFIERSTR	Domain implemented as `CHAR( 36 )`. This data type is used for remote data access, when mapping Microsoft SQL Server uniqueidentifier columns.

Note: As a separately licensed option, SAP Sybase IQ supports character large object (CLOB) data with a length ranging from zero (0) to 512TB (terabytes) for an SAP Sybase IQ page size of 128KB or 2PB (petabytes) for an SAP Sybase IQ page size of 512KB. The maximum length is equal to 4GB multiplied by the database page size. See Unstructured Data Analytics.

Storage Sizes
The storage size of character data, given column definition size and input data size.
Character Sets and Code Pages
Character data is placed in the database using the exact binary representation that is passed from the application.
Indexes
All index types, except DATE, TIME, and DTTM, are supported for CHAR data and VARCHAR data less than or equal to 255 bytes in length.
VARCHAR Data and Trailing Blanks
For a column of data type VARCHAR, trailing blanks within the data being inserted are handled differently depending on whether or not the data is enclosd in quotes.
Restriction on CHAR and VARCHAR Data Over 255 Bytes
Only the default index, WD, TEXT, and CMP index types are supported for CHAR and VARCHAR columns over 255 bytes.
Character Data Compatibility
Character data compatibility differences exist between SAP Sybase IQ and Adaptive Server Enterprise and SQL Anywhere.
Long Strings
Values up to 254 characters are stored as short strings, with a preceding length byte. Any values that are longer than 255 bytes are considered long strings. Characters after the 255th are stored separate from the row containing the long string value.

Parent topic: SQL Data Types

Related concepts

Binary Data Types

Character Data Type Compatibility

Related reference

Binary Data Types

NEWID Function [Miscellaneous]

STRTOUUID Function [String]

UUIDTOSTR Function [String]