Schedule - FOSDEM PGDay 2023

Tour de Data Types: VARCHAR2 or CHAR(255)?

Date: 2023-02-05
Time: 09:00–09:50
Room: PostgreSQL Devroom
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Ever wondered what might be the best data type for a certain use case? Is it better to use INTEGER or BIGINT, and should you use TIMESTAMP or is it better to use TIMESTAMPTZ? When is the last time you migrated a legacy database and wondered what to use as replacement for VARCHAR2 or CHAR(255)? How to store IP addresses or geographical data, does that fit into VARCHAR or is there something more suitable?

PostgreSQL 15 comes with around 40 different data types preinstalled. This talk looks beyond INTEGER and VARCHAR and dives into some of the lesser known PostgreSQL data types. Use cases and examples show which data type is a good fit for a certain situation.

Speaker

Andreas Scherbaum