Secondary Navigation. 1  Active Duty Dental Care. 2  Guard/Reserve Dental Care. 3  TRICARE Dental Program. 4  TRICARE Retiree Dental Program. 5  Enrolling in the TRICARE Retiree Dental Program. Costs. 6  Dental Benefits for Survivors. 7  Find a Dentist.
â¢ Although char and varchar are character data fields, char is a fixed length data field and varchar is a variable size data field. â¢ Char can store only fixed size non-Unicode string characters, but varchar can store variable sizes of strings.
CHAR(5) is fixed length, right padded with spaces. VARCHAR2(5) is variable length. Thus the difference between VARCHAR and VARCHAR2 is that VARCHAR is ANSI standard but takes up space whereas VARCHAR2 is Oracle-only but makes more efficient use of space.