John uses CHARACTER VARYING in the places where I use VARCHAR.
I am a beginner, while he is an expert.
This suggests me that there is something which I do not know.
What is the difference between CHARACTER VARYING and VARCHAR in PostgreSQL?
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Varying is an alias for varchar, so no difference, see documentation :)
The notations varchar(n) and char(n) are aliases for character varying(n) and character(n), respectively. character without length specifier is equivalent to character(1). If character varying is used without length specifier, the type accepts strings of any size. The latter is a PostgreSQL extension.
The only difference is that CHARACTER VARYING is more human friendly than VARCHAR
The PostgreSQL documentation on Character Types is a good reference for this. They are two different names for the same type.
Both are the same thing but many of the databases are not providing the varying char mainly postgreSQL is providing. So for the multi database like Oracle Postgre and DB2 it is good to use the Varchar
The short answer: there is no difference.
The long answer: CHARACTER VARYING is the official type name from the ANSI SQL standard, which all compliant databases are required to support. VARCHAR is a shorter alias which all modern databases also support. I prefer VARCHAR because it's shorter and because the longer name feels pedantic. However, postgres tools like pg_dump and \d will output character varying.
Source: Stackoverflow.com