Baffling MySQL data types

[Anon]

This is a bit of a newbie question.

I am curious as to the differnece between :

TEXT
and
TEXT(150)

I understand that the 150 is providing a rough estimate of size but does leaving out the size default the size to 0. Is size in this case measured in characers? Is it more expensive to do things this way??

Thanks for the help.

Mayu

[gio2k]

The string data types are:

char(length): length is fixed, and goes up to 255.
varchar(length): length is variable, and up to 255 chars
If you need to store text with more than 255 characters use: text, mediumtext or longtext types.

For example:

varchar(150) holds strings of variable length of maximum 150 chars. Longer strings will be truncated.
For all the TEXT datatypes you don't need to specify size, because text datatypes have variable sizes.

For more info check:
http://www.mysql.com/doc/S/t/String_types.html

-Gio-

[[deleted]]

the '150' is used by MySQL for display purposes. The trouble is that sometimes is also limits the output of that field to '150' characters even when you don't want that.

This is the most useless function that MySQL has. Just use the full TEXT field. And that goes for the other datatypes too, use the full field, not a limited version.

[Anon]

Thanx for the help 🙂