68 DB2 UDB V8 and WebSphere V5 Performance Tuning and Operations Guide
tuning of DB2 UDB V8” on page 237, we give some advice on how to choose the
correct data types.
String data
This section describes the three string data types CHAR, VARCHAR and LONG
VARCHAR. Each character string is further defined as one of:
Bit data: Data that is not associated with a code page
Single-byte character set (SBCS) data: Data in which every character is
represented by a single byte
Mixed data: Data that may contain a mixture of characters from a single-byte
character set and a multi-byte character set (MBCS)
When defining the length of a string data type, it is important to keep in mind that
the length represents the number of bytes and not the number of character ...