In DuckDB, strings can be stored in the VARCHAR field.

It is possible to supply a maximum length along with the type by initializing a type as VARCHAR(n), where n is a positive integer. Note that specifying this length is not required, and specifying this length will not improve performance or reduce storage space of the strings in the database. Specifying a maximum length is useful only for data integrity reasons, not for performance reasons. In fact, the following SQL statements are equivalent:

-- the following statements are equivalent
CREATE TABLE strings(
	val VARCHAR(10) -- val has a maximum length of 10 characters
);
CREATE TABLE strings(
	val VARCHAR CHECK(LENGTH(val) <= 10) -- val has a maximum length of 10 characters
);

The VARCHAR field allows storage of unicode characters. Internally, the data is encoded as UTF-8.

Functions

See Character Functions and Pattern Matching.