Yeah, you should be storing the password hashes in the DB, not the passwords. The hashes are going to be the same length regardless of the password's length.
If you wanted to get real fancy, hash the password once on the client side (reducing it to a known length), then again on the server. You should also be using a per-user salt to prevent a rainbow table from being generated if your DB is leaked.
I generally use 128-char passwords by default, and only use shorter ones when a service requires it.