ASA SQL Reference
  SQL Data Types
    Character data types

CHAR data type [Character]

Function 

Character data of maximum length max-length bytes.

Syntax 

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

Usage 

The default value of max-length is 1.

For strings up to 254 bytes in length, the storage requirement is the number of bytes in the string plus one additional byte. For longer strings, there is more overhead.

Strings of multi-byte characters can be held as the CHAR data type, but max-length is in bytes, not characters.

Parameters 

max-length     The maximum length in bytes of the string. The maximum size allowed is 32767.

Standards and compatibility 

• SQL/92    Compatible with SQL/92.

• Sybase    Compatible with Adaptive Server Enterprise. In Adaptive Server Enterprise, the storage requirements for CHAR data types is always max-length. The maximum max-length for Adaptive Server Enterprise is 255.

• Other database systems    In many other database-management systems, unlike Adaptive Server Anywhere, CHAR data types result in blank padding to the full length of the string. This means that they require max-length bytes of storage, regardless of the length of the actual string.

See also 

CHARACTER VARYING (VARCHAR) data type [Character]

LONG VARCHAR data type [Character]