If you’ve found yourself in the MySQL space even for a little while, you already know that MySQL and other flavors of it offer a couple of data types for developers to choose from. A wide majority of the most popular data types offered by MySQL are related to text — in this space, MySQL offers VARCHAR, CHAR, TINYTEXT, TEXT, and other options. In this article, we are going to go through the similarities and differences between two of some of the most popular options: the aforementioned VARCHAR and CHAR.

What Is CHAR and VARCHAR?

Before diving deeper into the differences between the two data types, we must first make you understand what they are, right? Well, everything in this space is pretty simple because the names of the data types themselves suggest what they are able to do — CHAR stands for “character values” and VARCHAR stands for “variable character values.”