Moving TEXT/BLOB to another table?

Anon

Right now, I have 3 fields defined as VARCHAR. 1 field is defined as BLOB. Would queries run faster if I moved the BLOB field to another table , converted the 3 VARCHAR fields to CHAR and used a JOIN instead?

Thanks,
Doug

Anon

Moving BLOB to another table won't increase speed. It might acctually decrease it becuase you are accessing another table again. I'm not sure what the differece with VARCHAR and CHAR is but I would use VARCHAR.

Anon

The main reason to use VARCHAR is if you are concerned about disk space. CHAR will be faster. However, I can't have CHAR with BLOB/TEXT so if I put it in a separate table, I can change the VARCHARs to CHAR. However, I'd like to know, given the tradeoffs, which will result in faster queries.

mp96brbj

I'm at a loss... if I know that I will filla column with strings ranging from 20 to 30 chars, how would that be stored in a CHAR(30) ? How does the database know how long the string is, if it is not defined as VARCHAR(30)?

This may seem like a very elementary question, but I've been using VARCHAR almost always, so I've never considered this.

Anon

If you have a char(30) field, and one record is 20 chars and another record is 30 chars, both of them will take up 30 bytes. That is why VARCHAR is more space conserving. But CHAR will be faster since it doesn't have to see how long it is.