I will make a note to look for that book, if you remember the title send me a message with it, thanks!

Just to clarify, my client wants to use varchar because they said through experimentation, they discovered that their asp code was too slow when they had to add trim functions to database access (select?) statements.  

(More details...)  Their forms/pages/(whatever they are called in asp) would be set up for the max size column.  The comparison of what was on the form to what is in the database would not work if the db column was char they said because of padding in the database.  When they changed the column datatype to varchar, they did not need to have a function in their code to trim, and their performance was improved.

I am just trying to verify the details to share with them the comparison of using different methods to accomplish what they want to do.  They are a small business, so their volumes are low enough that they can afford to waste some space, I was just trying to understand how much waste really was happening.

Thanks for the information.