Question

I am planning to store a json_encoded string on my database. I can’t precisely tell the length its going to be, but I’m pretty sure it will be long. My concern is which field type I am going to use for this, is it blob or text?

I prefer the one where I can save space as much as possible over fast searching, in any case I have other column where I should just index.

Answer 1

blob is usually for things like images, binaries etc. text should be good enough for your case, or you can use longtext which has even bigger space capacity if that’s really a concern.

Searching-wise, since you are storing json_encode‘d stuff, you’ll still need to call json_decode on it anyway for it to be useful in your application, I don’t think choice of datatype matters in this case.

A better way is to normalize your database design instead of storing related stuff in one big string of json.