What is the practical use for LONG VARCHAR instead of VARCHAR in Derby DB?

Question

I was looking through the derby documentation and found that the LONG VARCHAR description:

The LONG VARCHAR type allows you to store character strings with a maximum length of 32,700 characters. It is identical to VARCHAR, except that you cannot specify the maximum length when creating columns of this type.

My question is when will this be useful? In what situation would I rather have a VARCHAR with a maximum length that I cannot specify?

Answer 1

This is really not very helpful. This is a delay from earlier releases, in particular, from the release, in which compatibility with some other systems was recognized as an important feature. In practice, people use the usual VARCHAR for columns of moderate length and use CLOB / BLOB for columns of indefinite length.