Re: Do null columns take up space?

Mike Segel wrote: > > Benjamin Taub wrote: > > > > When using the ONLINE engine (current version), if a column contains a null, will it > > take up bytes in the record? The datatypes of the columns I'm interested in are all > > numeric. I believe that Oracle's engine will compress its tables by assigning no > > storage space to these nulls but I'm not sure how Informix handles this. > > No, sorry no compression. > > From what I remember, and please keep in mind I do suffer > from alzhimers ..... > > Informix has kept the table records fixed length. This allows for > faster seek, and fetch times. I am pretty sure this is true for > the standard engine, and I thought it would be true for the > Online stuff as well. > > Another thing to consider. If I have a variable length record and > I update it increasing the size of the record, then how do I store it? > > There are ways to do this, but the headached you will have don't make > it worthwhile. > > -MikeyRemember VARCHARS - they are variable length and Informix has to do some potentially tricky things out of sight when you update them, just as Oracle has to do. Ian