Does a varchar field's declared size have any impact in PostgreSQL?

Question

Is VARCHAR(100) any better than VARCHAR(500) from a performance point of view? What about disk usage?

Talking about PostgreSQL today, not some database some time in

Answer 1

TEXT /is/ the same as VARCHAR without an explicit length, the text

"The storage requirement for a short string (up to 126 bytes) is 1 byte plus the actual string, which includes the space padding in the case of character. Longer strings have 4 bytes overhead instead of 1. Long strings are compressed by the system automatically, so the physical requirement on disk might be less. Very long values are also stored in background tables so that they do not interfere with rapid access to shorter column values. In any case, the longest possible character string that can be stored is about 1 GB."

refers to both VARCHAR and TEXT (since VARCHAR(n) is just a limited version of TEXT). Limiting your VARCHARS artificially has no real storage or performance benefits (the overhead is based on the actual length of the string, not the length of the underlying varchar), except possibly for comparisons against wildcards and regexes (but at the level where that starts to matter, you should probably be looking at something like PostgreSQL's full-text indexing support).