Creating Search Engine Friendly URLs

[eluser]richthegeek[/eluser]
Mikle, and ajushi; the VARCHAR column type is properly expanded to "variable characters" - that is, the actual field size (and thus index size) is equivalent to the length of the entry.

You would store the MD5 in a CHAR(40) or VARCHAR(40) column, and each entry would always be 40 characters long.

Frankly though its unimportant, since any good sorting algorithm would only consider as many chars as are needed to place an item within a list (Apple and Anaconda would only test the first two, for example) so the actual length of the string is only an issue when you have two very similar strings (Apple and Apply) of large length.