In the past life was easy in MySQL. Both CHAR and VARCHAR types meant the same, only being difference in the sense of fixed or dynamic row length used. Trailing spaces were removed in both cases. With MySQL 5.0 however things changed so now VARCHAR keeps trailing spaces while CHAR columns do not any more. [...]
To pack or not to pack – MyISAM Key compression
May 13, 2006 By 4 Comments
MyISAM storage engine has key compression which makes its indexes much smaller, allowing better fit in caches and so improving performance dramatically. Actually packed indexes not a bit longer rows is frequent reason of MyISAM performing better than Innodb. In this article I’ll get in a bit more details about packed keys and performance implications [...]
