although the actual string stored is permitted to be a zero-length string (''). You can use the CHAR qualifier, for example VARCHAR2(10 CHAR), to give the maximum length in characters instead of bytes. A character is technically a code point of the database character set....
Data in CHAR columns is sorted in code-set order. For example, in the ASCII code set, the character a has a code-set value of 97, b has 98, and so forth. The database server sorts CHAR(n) data in this order. The NCHAR(n) data type also contains a sequence of n bytes. These...