No. No gain at all. The manual explicitly states:
Tip: There is no performance difference among these three types, apart from increased storage space when using the blank-padded type, and a few extra CPU cycles to check the length when storing into a length-constrained column. While
character(n)
has performance advantages in some other database systems, there is no such advantage in PostgreSQL; in factcharacter(n)
is usually the slowest of the three because of its additional storage costs. In most situationstext
orcharacter varying
should be used instead.
Bold emphasis mine.
char(n)
is a largely outdated, useless type. Stick with varchar(n)
. Without need to enforce a maximum length, varchar
or text
are a tiny bit faster, with fewer complications.
If all strings are exactly 36 characters in length, there is no storage saving either way, not even a minuscule one. Both have exactly the same size on disk and in RAM. You can test with pg_column_size()
(on an expression and on a table column).
And if all strings must have 36 characters, rather make it text
with a CHECK (length(col) = 36)
constraint enforcing exact length, not varchar(36)
only enforcing max. length. See:
You didn't ask for other options, but I'll mention two:
1. COLLATION
Unless you are running your DB with the "C" collation. Collation is often overlooked and possibly expensive. Since your strings don't seem to be meaningful in a natural language, there is probably no point in following COLLATION
rules. Related:
- How do I efficiently get "the most recent corresponding row"?
- EXECUTE within function not using index?
Extensive benchmark comparing (among other) the effect of COLLATE "C"
on performance:
2. UUID
Your string suspiciously looks like a UUID (32 hex digits separated by 4 delimiters in canonical way). It's much more efficient to store UUIDs as actual uuid
data type: faster in multiple ways, and only occupies 16 bytes per UUID - as opposed to 37 bytes in RAM for either char(36)
or varchar(36)
(stored without delimiters, just the 32 defining characters), or 33 bytes on disk. But alignment padding would result in 40 bytes either way in many cases.) COLLATION
is irrelevant for the uuid
data type, too.
SELECT '922475bb-ad93-43ee-9487-d2671b886479'::uuiduuid;
This may be helpful (last chapters):
See also: