>Hi Edward
>
>This was requested by customer who thought that by using varchar they could reduce the table file size.

Few weeks ago I bought a 600G drive for $90. Compare that with the cost of your work hour - saving space is just not worth the trouble - the table can't be larger than 2G anyway.

BTW, you can set compression on for the data directory. It would give at least 2:1 compression. It could do far better than that, but this ratio has a near zero impact on speed (the data still need to be compressed on-the-fly). This is based on technology that's more than ten years old, so any of its bugs have been fixed long ago.