TEXT versus MEDIUMTEXT Fields

Nickdane

I have to store text reports on a publicly accessible PHP website. Most of the time, a report can be fit in a TEXT field, but each now and then I have reports that exceed the limit. I can split any report into two parts and store them seperately, but it would obviously be easier if the TEXT field was changed to MEDIUMTEXT and every report was stored as one piece. I would like to know the performance/disc space...etc implications of such a change.

Thanks.

Nick

drew010

making that change wouldnt have too much of a performance cut at all. disk space wouldnt change much because the text types arent fixed length fields in mysql, meaning the size of the column is (length + 3) for mediumtext fields and (length + 2) for text fields. doing that should be perfectly fine for you.

http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Storage_requirements.html has information on type size requirements.

Nickdane

Thanks for the reply. I will do that.

It sounds that there must be something to having three different text types, even if nothing to do with disk space and performance, though I can be wrong.

Nick

drew010

i think that the 3 different sizes are mostly for categorization. i think eventually people would request the sizing. for example the person who knows all their tables will just hold text fields of 500k and another who knows its just going to hold 500Mb. using the different sizes just helps identify what amount of data is being stored.