>Larry,
>
>I'm not Andy, but I'll take a SWAG. A VARCHAR can contain 1 to n characters where n equals the maximum field size. A CHAR is fixed. I would think that resolving a variable length expression would be slower than a fixed length expression.

Hi George,
I would normally agree but this is an index we're talking about. Character expressions are compared one character at a time (at least they were in SQL Server of old). If index keys are stored in the same way field data is tired (e.g variable length) then I would think VARCHAR would be faster. However, I would think the difference would be neglible.

Regards.