Home/ Questions/Q 7658987
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-31T13:16:23+00:00

I am coding an online notes web application, and want to have support for

  • 0

I am coding an online notes web application, and want to have support for notes ranging from 200 characters to very long ones (~more than 10000 characters). These notes should be searchable.

  • How can I store the text note in my database, will it slow down my application if I use the same table for all notes?
  • Should I implement multiple types of notes (like short, long, very long, etc) and use different tables for them?
  • Should I use files instead of database entries for notes as long as 5000 characters?
  • How can I process a text search through these notes (in case I store them on different tables and/or files)?
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    10,000 characters isn’t all that large for MySQL. You can use a TEXT column to store up to 216 bytes. That’s enough if your text is ASCII. If it’s Unicode, then you can use a LONGTEXT field to store up to 232 bytes per record.

    Designing separate tables for different note lengths is, I think, a bad idea. It will make querying much more difficult.

    MySQL also supports full text searching. If you create an ISAM table, you can create a FULLTEXT index on the notes field to speed up searches (quite a bit). Search for FULLTEXT in the manual page for CREATE TABLE for details.

    • 0