ok... im developing a cms by using building a parent/child type relationship. anyway, more to the point. my table is setup something like;
CREATE TABLE node (
id INT AUTOINCRIMENT PRIMARY KEY,
node_type INT,
node_key CHAR(80),
node_value TEXT
)
this isn't the exact setup (so dont worry if the syntax isn't quite right), but should give you the idea.
bassically, the way this works is each node will have a type (this could be paragraph, heading, image, form etc), a key (this is used to reference the data) and a value (the actual data).
now, my concern is this. sometimes the 'value' will be an entire article (anywhere from 200 chars to 20000 chars) and other times it might be as small as a 30 char title.
what i would like to know is this. is there allot of overhead in assigning this field the type TEXT when at times i could get away with it just being a VARCHAR field? does mysql pre assign a certain amount of space? or does it only do that once the data is in there?
none of this is causing me any issues, just wondering.
