Is varchar just a remnant from before text came around, or are there use cases where you would want to use a varchar?  (Or char for that matter..)(I use Postgres and MySQL (MyISAM) daily, so those are what I'm most interested in, but answers for other databases are of course welcome.  ^_-)
Is there any reason to use varchar over text columns in a database?
database;performance;mysql;efficiency;postgres
In Generaltext columns are non standard and implementation specific. In many cases, depending on the database they may have a combination of one or more of the following restrictions: not indexable, not searchable and not sortable.In PostgresAll these types are internally saved using the same C data structure..In MySQLThe text column is a specialized version of BLOB and has restrictions on indexing.Just these two examples can be extrapolated to the other SQL RDBMS systems and should be reason enough to understand when to choose one type over the other.