Check here:
http://bit.ly/14Pizaz[
^]
But:
- "n" stands for national - it means, that the RDBMS is storing values as multibyte string using one or another
encoding[
^], as UTF-8 and so on
- the difference between char and varchar was originally the padding: "
abc
" in a
char(5)
filed would be "
abc
" (note the spaces), while in varchar(5) would be just "
abc
". As systems evolved, the internal storage handling of these two approaches became different. But that depends on the RDBSM also.
In case of Microsoft SQL Server, this will give you future clarification:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms176089.aspx[
^]
In case of MySQL, you should read this too:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/char.html[
^]