Character data types are strings of characters. Upper and lower case alphabetic characters are accepted literally. There are two fixed-length character data types: char and c, and three variable-length character data types: varchar, long varchar, and text.

The maximum row length is dependent on the default_page_size setting (a DBMS Server configuration parameter), and can be set to a maximum of 32,767 bytes. For further information on page and row size configuration, see the Database Administrator Guide.

The maximum length of a character column is limited by the maximum row width configured, but cannot exceed 32,000 bytes for a non-UTF8 installation and 16,000 bytes for a UTF8 installation. Long varchar columns are an exception: the maximum length of these columns is 2 GB.