You got it backwards. ;-) When storing UTF-8 characters in a VARCHAR(255), you may not be able to store 255 characters

That's curious. In sql server 2000 it's indeed the byte length, in postgres it's character length. And I just tried it in postgres, I can indeed store 64 characters with codepoints above 127 in a varchar(64) column (encoding is set to UTF-8).wikipedia says "characters"

Is there any normative source that is explicit about what's "correct"?

The size is the byte length. And 255 takes a single byte to store the length, anything above takes 2 bytes.

My real question was: do current RDBMs actually exploit that use only one byte to store the length?

Perl 6 - second systems done right

In reply to Re^2: [OT] Database row width and cargo cult programming by moritz
in thread [OT] Database row width and cargo cult programming by moritz

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