Sha1 Encryption problem

[eluser]n0xie[/eluser]
[quote author="t0nedef" date="1257656571"]no i meant varchar(40) which is a valid character string size for MySQL, but other databases may vary in their naming conventions.[/quote]
Why would you use a variable size column for a field that will ALWAYS be 40 characters long? Not to mention that Char is faster in lookup and takes less room to store the same amount of data, which results in faster query execution.