MySQL - large text area

[Daniel Hollands]

Hi there all, I have a questions relating to MySQL.

I'm setting up a database in MySQL, and i will be using PHP to pull the info out of it, to display on the page.

My questions is this, what type of variable should I use to story my main body text?

I'm not sure if it would be "text" or "blob" or if ever of these has any limits.

I need to know which type would be best to use for storing a lot of data and info in, any ideas?

Thanx guys (and gals)

[Woofcat]

Only difference between blob and text (assuming you're storing text and not binary info such as images, etc) is that in selects blob is case-sensitive and text isn't. If you never select on blob/text fields (which you generally shouldn't) it doesn't make any difference at all. I usually use text.

blob/text:
max 65535 characters

mediumblob/mediumtext:
max 16777215 characters

longblob/longtext:
max 4294967295 characters

[Daniel Hollands]

Thank you so much for the info, i've now gone and changed all my text's to longtext's

What could I do if I wanted to store more than 4294967295 characters?

not that I ever will, or think I will anyway.

[Koolguy]

Well you would be pretty much screwed but remember 4294967295 chacers is 4294967295 bytes or about 4GB. Are you really gonna store that much lol.

[Daniel Hollands]

Well, I was never planning on storing that much data, after all, I only have 70MB of space :)

I was just intrested :)