CHAR [ ( max-length [ CHAR | CHARACTER ] ) ]

Multibyte characters can be stored as CHAR, but the declared length refers to bytes, not characters, unless character-length semantics are used.

CHAR can also be specified as CHARACTER. Regardless of which syntax is used, the data type is described as CHAR.

CHAR is semantically equivalent to VARCHAR, although they are different types. In SQL Anywhere, CHAR is a variable-length type. In other relational database management systems, CHAR is a fixed-length type, and data is padded with blanks to max-length bytes of storage. SQL Anywhere does not blank-pad stored character data.

How CHAR columns are described depends on the client interface, the character sets used, and if character-length semantics are used. For example, in embedded SQL the described length is the maximum number of bytes in the client character set. If the described length would be more than 32767 bytes, the column is described as type DT_LONGVARCHAR. The following table shows some embedded SQL examples and the results returned when a DESCRIBE is performed:

For ODBC, CHAR is described as either SQL_CHAR or SQL_VARCHAR depending on the odbc_distinguish_char_and_varchar option.

• odbc_distinguish_char_and_varchar option
• VARCHAR data type
• LONG VARCHAR data type
• NCHAR data type