title: using varchar over varchar(n) with Postgresql
body: <p>I'm designing a database, since I'm not yet confortable with the data types I was wondering the following :</p>
  
  <p>If I don't care about the length of a vector of characters, is it appropriate to use <strong>varchar</strong> ? (even if the strings are expected to be quite short ?)</p>
  
  <p>Until now I've been using <strong>text</strong> (varchar) when I needed to store really long strings but reading the documentation and asking questions around I heard postgresql does not store the extra-bytes if the maximum-length is supplied and the stored string's length is lesser than it.
  I guess the maximum-length is used in case the distant device can't afford large memory space.
  Could one agree or explain that ?</p>