SQL TEXT Vs VARCHAR Datatype

When you talk about character kinds, you're referring to the types of characters that you can store in your database. In PostgreSQL, there are three character types.

The first is character(n), often known as char(n), which is used to store characters with a defined length.

The other is the character varying(n), often known as varchar (n), where n is the amount of characters that make up a character.

The final character type is text, which can be any length. It's worth noting that when using char(n) and varchar (n), n should be a positive integer value indicating the column's length.

SQL TEXT Datatype

The TEXT datatype is used to hold character values and has no limit on length because there is no n specified.

The value of n in varchar is optional; if it is not supplied, the column's length becomes infinite, and it behaves similarly to the text datatype. When n, i.e. length, is not mentioned in the declaration, the performance of varchar(n) and text is the same.

Example: Let’s create a new table(say,text) for the demonstration using the below commands:

CREATE TABLE text(
    id no PRIMARY KEY,
    a TEXT,
        b TEXT
);

SQL VARCHAR Datatype

VARCHAR is a character data type supported by PostgreSQL.

This data type is used to store characters that are only a certain length.

In PostgreSQL, it is represented as varchar (n), where n is the maximum character length.

If n is not specified, the type is varchar, which has an unlimited length.

Any attempt to store a longer string in a column defined with varchar(n) results in an error from PostgreSQL.

However, if the extra characters are all spaces, PostgreSQL will truncate the spaces to the maximum length and store the string.

The only advantage of specifying the length specifier for the varchar data type is that PostgreSQL will check for and report an error if you attempt to insert a longer string.

Example: Let’s create a new table(say, test) for the demonstration using the below commands:

CREATE TABLE test (
    id no PRIMARY KEY,
    a VARCHAR (1),
        b VARCHAR(10)
);

SQL Difference Between TEXT And VARCHAR Datatype

The distinguish in text & varchar datatype points are tabulated in below table:-