Re: Do null columns take up space?

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. -Mikey