Benefit of TEXT with CHECK over VARCHAR(X) in PostgreSQL. Brandur suggests using email TEXT CHECK (char_length(email) <= 255) to define a column with a length limit in PostgreSQL over VARCHAR(255) because TEXT and VARCHAR are equally performant but a CHECK length can be changed later on without locking the table, whereas a VARCHAR requires an ALTER TABLE with an exclusive lock.
Recent articles
- The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see - 15th August 2025
- Open weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across providers - 15th August 2025
- LLM 0.27, the annotated release notes: GPT-5 and improved tool calling - 11th August 2025