STL string class and fixed buffer

Hi,
I’m writing a class in C++ to access an Oracle database. Oracle provides this thing called VARCHAR which gets translated into this complex structure and a regular char buffer to hold the string I’m interested in the database. The class I’m writing would wrap this VARCHAR thing and provide access to the string like a normal STL style string class. So here is my question: is there a way I can assign a fixed length char buffer to be used as the buffer in a string object?

Thanks in advance,
Doug Farrell
dfarrell@grolier.com