long-ass text storage

fordiman

Ok, I have a MySQL table called "Articles" that is used to store some information about an article (ID, Author, release date, etc) and the body of the article.

Now, I WAS useing LONGTEXT for the body field, but discovered that for anything like an actual article, the amount of data this stores it WAY too short.

My question is, is there any kind of dynamic text colum type that can store any amount of text you give it?

I'd rather not resort to blobs, as they cause a problem in searching.

junebug

just as a thought you could just save the article in 'pages' where each entry is a page of the article and you can keep the articles grouped together using a common id number.

just a thought.

fordiman

You mean in web-pages? no-can-do. the server doesn't allow the php engine permission to do direct writes to my space, so submissions would just sit in temporary space-limbo forever.

junebug

no i mean you store it in the database as pages. so you have fields like: article, articleid, page.

then you can take and put so much of the article in one database entry, so much in the next and so on. and to know they are all the same article you give them all a common id number (articleid). and tell which order they go in by storing the page number in page.

this way you can query the database, get one page of the article, format it and print it, then the next, and so on.

fordiman

How would I go about determining where to divide the page?

junebug

how ever you wanted to. after so many paragraphs, divide the page. after so many characters. if it is user submited, they could submit it by page. if it's from a form textbox, set a maxlength on the text box to make a page, then make them submit the page, and start a new page in a fresh textbox. however you want.

Anon

Uhmm I'm sorry to interject into this thread, but what?

A LONGTEXT field can hold up to 2³² - 1 characters. Which translates to 4,294,967,295 characters. Are you trying to put the entire library of congress into one article? You do run into a limit, though, at 16megs, as that is the limit for the MyISAM protocol to insert the row. But even then, you have 16 megs of TEXT for one article? I think you should look somewhere else, because this is not a database issue.

Chris King

fordiman

is there a size limit on the storage of a string in PHP?

junebug

scratches head

since i don't use much text stuff besides varchar i guess i should have looked at the mysql manual. oh well. just chalk up another mark on the dumbass board.

so, yeah. what chris said. this doesn't sound like a database problem.

captainhappyman

Why don't you take the value of the textarea and save that to a text file on the server (named using the pd, or whatever primary key you're using), then use the field in the database to point to that file?

That way, you could still serve dynamically, but your database would remain a much more manageable size.

fordiman

Weird... somehow when I was in the middle of rewriting the database to be paged, and then (being told it's not a database problem) stopped in the middle and had to partially rewrite my original engine, I fixed the bug!

Well, thanks anyways guys, you've given me some good ideas.