>>The way I see it the ones they use are for fields of undetermined length (ie: may exceed 255 chars). When your building a system like they are doing it is what is needed -- especially since some hold binary data, etc. I was under the impression you were using them to hold stuff like text that you know is less then 255 chars. If I mistook you -- whoops! Sorry!
>>
>>Of course what I mentioned was my opinion only & is the way I look at things.
>>
>I've seen you get a few right answers here...
>
>I was wanting to store chunks of text to go into HTML files and also filenames.
>
>It just made sense to have elastic fields, why did they make them if they are not reliable?


Not that they are unreliable but like I pointed out earlier they can grow in size drammatically if you are not carefull.

Tom