I am one of the people that does read the documentation. My business partner, Jake, asked why use varchar with an artificial limit for fields that don’t really have a limit. My initial thought was because of performance benefits, but I had never verified this. So, I spent a few minutes to verify this and guess what I find in the PostgreSQL documentation.

… If you desire to store long strings with no specific upper limit, use text or character varying without a length specifier, rather than making up an arbitrary length limit.)

It continues on and says…

Tip: There are no performance differences between these three types, apart from increased storage size when using the blank-padded type, and a few extra cycles to check the length when storing into a length-constrained column. While character(n) has performance advantages in some other database systems, it has no such advantages in PostgreSQL. In most situations text or character varying should be used instead.

Exactly what I was looking for! This is what I call great documentation.

I have used MySQL in the past, but my experience with PostgreSQL has been awesome. Great database that scales relatively well (we will find that out soon :)), supports most of what you expect from a db, and has good documentation!