After looking at the docs on the
character datatypes I noticed that if you don't specify a limit on the varchar
type it will accept strings of any length. If that's the case, what's the
difference between it and text?
Actually, I'd like to know this too :-) I think that there is no difference really...
But what confuses me is - why are there two completely separate types? Is it just to keep the standards happy?
Or is there some hidden difference in the behaviour?
For example, there used to be a 'datetime' in 7.2, that was just an alias for timestamp without timezone -
so that:
create table times (t timestamp without time zone, d datetime);
\d times
Column | Type | Modifiers
--------+-----------------------------+-----------
t | timestamp without time zone |
d | timestamp without time zone |
But if I try the same thing with text and varchar, I get two different type - text and character varying...
Could somebody who knows shed some light on this?
Thanks!
Dima
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