[NF] Varchar(4000) or varchar(max) (was INT vs MEDIUMINT vs SMALLINT vs TINYINT)

On 2017-10-28 07:17, Charlie-gm wrote:

Whatever the case, please don't do something idiotic like declare "VARCHAR(4000)" for fields that will never have more than 20 characters. That's the most common, stupid, wasteful, inefficient mistake I've seen in so-called "enterprise" apps.

Hi Charlie,

I don't do that but I thought using varchar(n) fields were supposed to be space-efficient in a sense that it just used a extra 1 or 2 bytes up front at the head of the record to identify the true length? It's not really allocating the space like a CHAR(n) field would...right?