Question

I would like to make a simple notice / news system for website administrators.

What is the best solution, to store those messages (up to 250 characters) in database?

VARCHAR(255) or TEXT?

Thanks

Answer 1

If they are to be short, define a hard upper limit and use VARCHAR(). If you don’t think they’ll go above 250 chars, make the size VARCHAR(512) to give yourself plenty of room to change your mind at a moment’s notice. (You could always alter the column definition later anyway).

TEXT and BLOB types are really intended for data of unknown/undetermined/unlimited length. If you have no problem defining a limit, then define one and use VARCHAR(). You’ll get more flexibility out of sorting and indexing from VARCHAR(), as TEXT can only use up to max_sort_length bytes to sort on.

If it matters for your use case, you cannot assign a default value to TEXT columns.

Much of this is detailed in the MySQL documentation on BLOB & TEXT types.