long text input

[zzz]

I need to add a field to an existing table. The input will be a few paragraps of text. Shall I be using LONGTEXT or BLOB? And what's the difference between the two?

[herve]

Cf http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/blob.html

In short, BLOB are for binary data and TEXT are for character strings, so in your case,
LONGTEXT will be ok.

And btw, if you need less than 16 MB per record/column, a MEDIUMTEXT can be enough (or even TEXT, if < 64 K😎

Cf http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/storage-requirements.html

[zzz]

Oh, wow. If I have about a page of text, which is less than 3000 chars, than my size if approx 3K. I can definitely use TEXt!

Thanks for the tip. The MySQL manual wasn't very clear...