Is there a good reason I see VARCHAR(255) used so often (as opposed to another length)?

Question

In multiple courses, books, and jobs, I have seen text fields defined as VARCHAR(255) as kind of the default for \"shortish\" text. Is there any good reason that a length o

Answer 1

An unsigned 1 byte number can contain the range [0-255] inclusive. So when you see 255, it is mostly because programmers think in base 10 (get the joke?) :)

Actually, for a while, 255 was the largest size you could give a VARCHAR in MySQL, and there are advantages to using VARCHAR over TEXT with indexing and other issues.