Simon Willison’s Weblog

MySQL text limits

1st August 2002

Today’s scary discovery: MySQL TEXT fields have a limit of 65,000 bytes. If you insert anything larger than that in to a normal TEXT field mySQL will silently truncate your data without telling you (meaning software checks are probably a good idea). MEDIUMTEXT will store 16 million characters and LONGTEXT can handle over 4 trillion, but this information does not appear to be readily available in the online mySQL manual (although it is hinted at in this table). Something to bare in mind when designing database applications.