Datatypes, and length.

[I Will Make It]

Hi, should articles be stored as VARCHAR, or TEXT?
My articles will be about 500-800 words.
And the length?

Varchar = 3992 characters?
Text = 65,535 characters?

Does this mean that I can store 65,535 letters in TEXT and 3992 letters using VARCHAR?

What's most used when you want to put articles into a DB?

[txbakers]

VARCHAR in mySQL has a 255 character limit. You will need TEXT if you want to store the entire article.

[I Will Make It]

ahh.. ok :) thank you

[moltar]

Values in VARCHAR columns are variable-length strings. The length can be specified as a value from 0 to 255 before MySQL 5.0.3, and 0 to 65,535 in 5.0.3 and later versions. (The maximum effective length of a VARCHAR in MySQL 5.0.3 and later is determined by the maximum row size and the character set used. The maximum length overall is 65,532 bytes.)

[txbakers]

oooh! that's nice. I didn't know that about 5.0.3. That's good to know.

But the VarChar is a fixed size ultimately