Well i think what it is saying, is that manipulating and moving the data is quicker with fixed blocks(char) than unfixed lengths(varchar).

But the sorts must be the way the index is built only someone who knows the internals of the sort mechanism would be able to tell us why.

--> Shawn

>Thanks, Shawn, I hadn't seen that.
>
>But, is it just me or do these two statements seem to contradict each other?
>
>>... sorts performed on VARCHAR columns are generally faster than on CHAR columns ...<
>
>> ... While it may take up a little more space to store the data, processing fixed-length columns is faster in SQL Server than processing variable-length columns ...<
>
>~~Bonnie
>