摘自：http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/char.html
In contrast to CHAR, VARCHAR values are stored as a 1-byte or 2-byte length prefix plus data. The length prefix indicates the number of bytes in the value. A column uses one length byte if values require no more than 255 bytes, two length bytes if values may require more than 255 bytes.
表的列数限制：
There is a hard limit of 4096 columns per table, but the effective maximum may be less for a given table. The exact limit depends on several interacting factors.
表的行大小限制：
Every table (regardless of storage engine) has a maximum row size of 65,535 bytes. Storage engines may place additional constraints on this limit, reducing the effective maximum row size.
是说一行所有列长加和：
The maximum row size constrains the number (and possibly size) of columns because the total length of all columns cannot exceed this size. For example, utf8 characters require up to three bytes per character, so for a CHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 column, the server must allocate 255 × 3 = 765 bytes per value. Consequently, a table cannot contain more than 65,535 / 765 = 85 such columns.
For VARCHAR columns, trailing spaces in excess of the column length are truncated prior to insertion and a warning is generated, regardless of the SQL mode in use. For CHAR columns, truncation of excess trailing spaces from inserted values is performed silently regardless of the SQL mode.
VARCHAR values are not padded when they are stored. Trailing spaces are retained when values are stored and retrieved, in conformance with standard SQL.
The following table illustrates the differences between CHAR and VARCHAR by showing the result of storing various string values into CHAR(4) and VARCHAR(4) columns (assuming that the column uses a single-byte character set such as latin1).
CHAR(4)
VARCHAR(4)
'' |
' ' |
4 bytes | '' |
1 byte |
'ab' |
'ab ' |
4 bytes | 'ab' |
3 bytes |
'abcd' |
'abcd' |
4 bytes | 'abcd' |
5 bytes |
'abcdefgh' |
'abcd' |
4 bytes | 'abcd' |
5 bytes |