Question

I can’t help but believe this topic has been written about over and over again but I’m having trouble finding any good, solid information.

What data type should I use to store 200 to 400 words of text? What about longer articles that could approach two or three thousand words?

What options should affect my decision? I don’t plan to search this data but I can’t completely rule out the possibility that I may want to do that later.

Unfortunately my background is MS Access where the only option for this was a memo field. It doesn’t appear to be quite so simple with MySQL.

Answer 1

If you’re using MySQL 5.0.3 or later, go VARCHAR. It can hold 65k bytes. As long as you have only 1 long VARCHAR per row, you should be fine.

Otherwise go with text.

From the mysql manual:

BLOB and TEXT differ from VARBINARY
and VARCHAR in the following ways:

There is no trailing-space removal for
BLOB and TEXT columns when values are
stored or retrieved. Before MySQL
5.0.3, this differs from VARBINARY and VARCHAR, for which trailing spaces are
removed when values are stored.

On comparisons, TEXT is space extended
to fit the compared object, exactly
like CHAR and VARCHAR.

For indexes on BLOB and TEXT columns,
you must specify an index prefix
length. For CHAR and VARCHAR, a prefix
length is optional. See Section 7.5.1,
“Column Indexes”.

BLOB and TEXT columns cannot have
DEFAULT values.

Also nice to know (from the manual):

Instances of BLOB or TEXT columns in
the result of a query that is
processed using a temporary table
causes the server to use a table on
disk rather than in memory because the
MEMORY storage engine does not support
those data types

which you really should take into account when formulating queries which use TEXT.