Hacker News Reader

Dear database developers, please don't get hung up on string lengths.

I'd be very happy to ask the DB for (say) a UTF-8 string of up-to 80 bytes. That means I could store 80 ASCII characters, 40 two-byte characters, 20 four-byte characters or some mixture as I wish.

View on HN

At least PostgreSQL does not care about string length, other than as required by the SQL standard (e.g. it enforces varchar(20) by counting the number of code points). The maximum size of a string in PostgreSQL is 1 GB.

While I agree with you, as I understand the SQL standard defines the N in varchar(N) as characters (not bytes).

There is a pathological case which is not common: max length of all 4-byte characters. Indexes are used to enforce features like unique constraints, it's important that everything can fit in the buffer length.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com