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<p>How do you determine the storage length of a varchar2. Not the length of the current stored value, but what is the maximum number of characters that can be stored in the varchar2 ? </p>
In the past, in version7.3 and before, varchars were limited to255 bytes (not characters - byte, in a multibyte character set you might be able to only store a few characters - far fewer than255).Starting in8.0 - the limit was raised to4000 bytes till11g (again, not characters - in a multibyte character set you might be only able to store a few hundred characters in a varchar2(4000)).
Beginning with Oracle Database12c, you can specify a maximum size of32767 bytes for the VARCHAR2, NVARCHAR2, and RAW data types. You can control whether your database supports this new maximum size by setting the initialization parameter MAX_STRING_SIZE