Hi. I'm currently trying out Firebird with PHP.

Correct me if I'm wrong. I think that firebird fills the remaining
parts of the field with blank spaces. Say I have a varchar(50) field.
I entered a record with, say, 10 characters. I noticed that when I
retrieve the data, my textfield has the inputed character plus blank
spaces which I suspect represents the other 40 spaces.

Questions:

1. If this is the case, does this mean that, if I declare a field of
50 chars, even if i don't use them all, each record will consume 50 bytes?

2. Is there a work around so that the other free spaces are not used up?

Thanks.

Arnold