[edanm]

Thanks for the explanation, didn't know that.

Is this true in most modern DBs? (I'm thinking MySQL and Postgres particularly).

[icebraining]

Close enough in PostgreSQL. String columns larger than 256 actually use 4 bytes to indicate the length, but on the other hand, large strings are automatically compressed, so they may use less space than 4 + length.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/datatype-character...