String Data Types

There are two ANSIClosed American National Standards Institute SQL standard types supported in Exasol for characters: CHAR and VARCHAR.

The CHAR(n) data type has a fixed and pre-defined length n. When you insert a shorter value than the pre-defined length, then spacing characters (padding) are used to fill the space. The length is limited to 2000 characters and you can use ASCII or UTF-8 (Unicode) to define the character set.

VARCHAR(n) can contain any string of the length n or smaller. These strings are stored in their respective length. The maximum allowed length is 2,000,000 characters and you can use ASCII or UTF-8 (Unicode) to define the character set.

If no character set is defined in both CHAR(n) and VARCHAR(n), by default UTF-8 will be considered.

Exasol Type (ANSI type) Character Set Note
CHAR(n) ASCII, UTF-8 1 ≤ n ≤ 2,000
VARCHAR(n) ASCII, UTF-8 1 ≤ n ≤ 2,000,000