SQL
Specifying a Length Limit
Specifying the length for the `VARCHAR`, `STRING`, and `TEXT` types is not required and has no effect on the system. Specifying the length will not improve performance or reduce storage space of the strings in the database. These variants variant is supported for compatibility reasons with other systems that do require a length to be specified for strings.  
If you wish to restrict the number of characters in a `VARCHAR` column for data integrity reasons the `CHECK` constraint should be used, for example:  
```sql
CREATE TABLE strings (
val VARCHAR CHECK (length(val) <= 10) -- val has a maximum length of 10
);
```  
The `VARCHAR` field allows storage of Unicode characters. Internally, the data is encoded as UTF-8.