Not strong on db internals, but those are 100% the exception, late additions, and not recommended for performance. The table is stored as a fixed length struct

Not strong on db internals, but those are 100% the exception, late additions, and not recommended for performance. The table is stored as a fixed length structure and var length fields are pointers to some other place. In the same manner that a traditional table might point to some other book for more details. Csv is also exclusively variable length, and it's nevet fixed length. Another example of fixed length structures are arrays. I'm not postulating a novel breakthrough.