MySQL: Large VARCHAR vs. TEXT?

Solution 1:

• TEXT and BLOB may by stored off the table with the table just having a pointer to the location of the actual storage. Where it is stored depends on lots of things like data size, columns size, row_format, and MySQL version.

• VARCHAR is stored inline with the table. VARCHAR is faster when the size is reasonable, the tradeoff of which would be faster depends upon your data and your hardware, you'd want to benchmark a real-world scenario with your data.

Solution 2:

Can you predict how long the user input would be?

VARCHAR(X)

Max Length: variable, up to 65,535 bytes (64KB)
Case: user name, email, country, subject, password

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TEXT

Max Length: 65,535 bytes (64KB)
Case: messages, emails, comments, formatted text, html, code, images, links

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MEDIUMTEXT

Max Length: 16,777,215 bytes (16MB)
Case: large json bodies, short to medium length books, csv strings

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LONGTEXT

Max Length: 4,294,967,29 bytes (4GB)
Case: textbooks, programs, years of logs files, harry potter and the goblet of fire, scientific research logging

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