VARCHAR2 datatype in ORACLE

I am very new to oracle and today I found about the data type VARCHAR2, and I wanted to learn more about it and google the datatype where I met the problem.

I have gone through few articles about the datatype, and I found out some direct opposite descriptions for VARCHAR2.

DESCRIPTION 1:

• When you create a table with a VARCHAR2 column, you specify a maximum column length (in bytes, not characters) between 1 and 2000 for the VARCHAR2 column(article)

DESCRIPTION 2:

• you can store up to 4000 characters in a VARCHAR2 column. (article)

As you can see it is bit confusing. Is VARCHAR2 is to specify the maximum column length or maximum characters length? Somebody please explain me which one is the correct one?

It depends on your Oracle version, but both articles are mostly incorrect.

When you DECLARE the column, you can either declare the stated length EXPLICITLY as either bytes or characters, or IMPLICITLY using your session's default.

Also, the maximum length is 4000 bytes, NOT characters. Even if you declare VARCHAR2(4000 CHAR), the column cannot store more than 4000 BYTES. It will store 4000 characters if they are all single-byte, otherwise it will store fewer than 4000 characters.