> But we're not discussing varchar here. Or are you saying that char is
> actually totally deprecated and everyone should use varchar even for
> fixed-width data? Not!

YES! That's exactly what I've been talking about for years. CHAR is
ancient data type from COBOL times and it has no point now.

> From the application it's not always easy to determine N, because the
> select may very well contain concatenations etc.

On contrary. No matter of SELECT expression
N = SQLVAR.sqllen/bytes_per_char, where bytes_per_char is 4 for UTF8 and
1 for most others (let's forget about UNICODE_FSS).

> But it *has* to know N!

Calculation is easy.

SY, SD.