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I was looking through the derby documentation and found that the description for a LONG VARCHAR is:
The LONG VARCHAR type allows storage of character strings with a maximum length of 32,700 characters. It is identical to VARCHAR, except that you cannot specify a maximum length when creating columns of this type.
My question is, when would this be useful? In what situation would I rather have a VARCHAR with a max length that I can’t specify?
It’s really not very useful. It’s a holdover from earlier releases, specifically from a release where compatibility with some other systems was deemed an important feature. In practice, people use normal VARCHAR for columns of moderate length, and use CLOB/BLOB for columns of indeterminate length.