Reader's Comments

Both MySQL and MS SQL have higher limit of VARCHAR: 1,048,543 and 8000, respectively. This is taken from http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/crash-me.php?res_id=38

-- Victor F, August 21, 2004

A few years ago I was working on a Sybase SQL Server database to store the text of transcribed medical reports. The good folks at Sybase warned us not to use columns of type TEXT (the equivalent of an Oracle CLOB) and to store lines of text in a VARCHAR column instead. (At the time Sybase limited VARCHAR columns to 255 bytes.) This works well as long as you don't have any lines longer than 255 characters. The only problem is that you have to parse the text into lines and then do an indefinite number of INSERTs. But it was less work that using the functions to manipulate TEXT data.

-- David Smith, June 29, 2005

In Oracle 11g length() now works with NCLOBs. Sadly, select distinct still does not.

-- Janek Bogucki, July 2, 2009