What are the Maximum Storage Capacities of MySQL's TINYTEXT, TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT, and LONGTEXT Data Types?

Determining Maximum Storage Capacities for Text Data Types in MySQL (MariaDB)

MySQL (and its fork, MariaDB) provide four different TEXT data types: TINYTEXT, TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT, and LONGTEXT. These types were designed to accommodate varying storage requirements for textual data. To understand their capabilities, let's delve into the maximum storage capacities of each type when using UTF-8 character encoding.

TINYTEXT:

TINYTEXT supports a maximum storage capacity of up to 255 bytes.

TEXT:

TEXT allows for a maximum storage capacity of up to 65,535 bytes. This corresponds to approximately 64 kilobytes (KiB).

MEDIUMTEXT:

MEDIUMTEXT increases the storage limit significantly to 16,777,215 bytes, which equates to approximately 16 megabytes (MiB).

LONGTEXT:

LONGTEXT offers the most generous storage capacity among the TEXT data types, supporting up to 4,294,967,295 bytes. This corresponds to approximately 4 gigabytes (GiB).

Impact of Character Encoding:

It's important to note that the number of characters that can be stored in a column using any of these data types will vary depending on the character encoding used. UTF-8, for instance, is a multi-byte character encoding, meaning that each character can occupy one or more bytes. Therefore, the maximum number of characters that can be stored in a column will depend on the specific UTF-8 characters used.

For example, if your data contains primarily ASCII characters (most common English characters and symbols), you can store more characters within the same byte limit compared to storing Unicode characters, which may occupy multiple bytes.

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