To give an example on varchars. Postgres never uses more space for varchars than strictly necessary. In fact, it is common to use text columns which are varchar

To give an example on varchars. Postgres never uses more space for varchars than strictly necessary. In fact, it is common to use text columns which are varchars extended to 2 gigabytes. Furthermore, postgres is capable of automatically compressing and decompressing data on the fly, no interaction required. It also has specialized data types for pretty much any task you can imagine and a very robust extension system in case you need to roll your own types.