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The thing that usually confuses new people is that all Progress OpenEdge data is variable length. Display format and storage format are unrelated. Almost all data written to Progress OpenEdge databases is written by Progress 4GL code. (4GL is occasionally referred to as "ABL" in the official documentation.) 4GL programs DO NOT care what the "display format" of the data is when they write it. As a result it is very common for data fields to be "over stuffed". That is the display format is 30 characters but the field contains 32, or 40, or 93 or 30,000 characters... Those of us who are "native" to Progress mostly think that this is one of the database's most wonderful features and we are forever flummoxed that anyone would deliberately use something like SQL that is so pointlessly restrictive. When you use a random SQL tool to query an OpenEdge database you will often think your data is "messed up" because random SQL tools think that the display format of the data is the same as the storage format. Depending on the version of Progress you are working with this can be dealt with by running the "dbtool" utility which will update a special "sql width" column to reflect the actual maximum width of fields (plus a bit of padding). Or there are some relatively new parameters that will automatically adjust these things or quietly truncate the returned data.
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