Quoth Marijn Haverbeke marijnh@gmail.com:
I meant that I thougth that postgresql could be faster with fixed lenght fields, not postmodern, sorry... :-D
Benchmark this, before you make life hard for yourself. I seem to remember an expert telling me that fixed char columns are rarely useful anymore.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/datatype-character.html
"There are no performance differences between [character, character varying & text data types], apart from increased storage size when using the blank-padded type, and a few extra cycles to check the length when storing into a length-constrained column. While `character(N)' has performance advantages in some other database systems, it has no such advantages in PostgreSQL. In most situations `text' or `character varying' should be used instead."
Seb