Erik Darling has a head-slapping moment:
While working with a client recently, we found that someone, at some point in time, probably during the original migration from Access, had chosen CHAR columns rather than VARCHAR columns.
Okay, fine. How bad could it be?
Bad enough that… A whole bunch of columns that only had a single character in them were stored in CHAR(1000) columns.
I like CHAR…well, to be specific, NCHAR. But only when you’ll need exactly that many characters.