TEXT

Variable-length character string. A TEXT column can store up to 65,535 characters, often used for storing longer text content.

Syntax

TEXT[(M)] [CHARACTER SET charset_name] [COLLATE collation_name]

Description

A TEXT column with a maximum length of 65,535 (2¹⁶ - 1) characters. The effective maximum length is less if the value contains multi-byte characters. Each TEXT value is stored using a two-byte length prefix that indicates the number of bytes in the value. If you need a bigger storage, consider using MEDIUMTEXT instead.

An optional length M can be given for this type. If this is done, MariaDB creates the column as the smallest TEXT type large enough to hold valuesM characters long.

BLOB and TEXT columns can be assigned a DEFAULT value.

Examples

Trailing spaces:

CREATE TABLE strtest (d TEXT(10));
INSERT INTO strtest VALUES('Maria   ');

SELECT d='Maria',d='Maria   ' FROM strtest;
+-----------+--------------+
| d='Maria' | d='Maria   ' |
+-----------+--------------+
|         1 |            1 |
+-----------+--------------+

SELECT d LIKE 'Maria',d LIKE 'Maria   ' FROM strtest;
+----------------+-------------------+
| d LIKE 'Maria' | d LIKE 'Maria   ' |
+----------------+-------------------+
|              0 |                 1 |
+----------------+-------------------+

Example of TEXT

CREATE TABLE text_example (
   description VARCHAR(20),
   example TEXT
) DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; -- One byte per char makes the examples clearer

INSERT INTO text_example VALUES
   ('Normal foo', 'foo'),
   ('Trailing spaces foo', 'foo      '),
   ('NULLed', NULL),
   ('Empty', ''),
   ('Maximum', RPAD('', 65535, 'x'));

SELECT description, LENGTH(example) AS length
   FROM text_example;

+---------------------+--------+
| description         | length |
+---------------------+--------+
| Normal foo          |      3 |
| Trailing spaces foo |      9 |
| NULLed              |   NULL |
| Empty               |      0 |
| Maximum             |  65535 |
+---------------------+--------+

Data too Long

When SQL_MODE is strict (the default) a value is considered "too long" when its length exceeds the size of the data type, and an error is generated.

Example of data too long behavior for TEXT:

TRUNCATE text_example;

INSERT INTO text_example VALUES
   ('Overflow', RPAD('', 65536, 'x'));

ERROR 1406 (22001): Data too long for column 'example' at row 1

Indexing

A unique index can be created on a TEXT column.

Internally, this uses hash indexing to quickly check the values and if a hash collision is found, the actual stored values are compared in order to retain the uniqueness.

Difference between VARCHAR and TEXT

• VARCHAR columns can be fully indexed. TEXT columns can only be indexed over a specified length.

• Using TEXT or BLOB in a SELECT query that uses temporary tables for storing intermediate results will force the temporary table to be disk based (using the Aria storage engine instead of the memory storage engine, which is a bit slower. This is not that bad as the Aria storage engine caches the rows in memory. To get the benefit of this, one should ensure that the aria_pagecache_buffer_size variable is big enough to hold most of the row and index data for temporary tables.

For Storage Engine Developers

• Internally the full length of the VARCHAR column is allocated inside each TABLE objects record[] structure. As there are three such buffers, each open table will allocate 3 times max-length-to-store-varchar bytes of memory.

• TEXT and BLOB columns are stored with a pointer (4 or 8 bytes) + a 1-4 bytes length. The TEXT data is only stored once. This means that internally TEXT uses less memory for each open table but instead has the additional overhead that each TEXT object needs to be allocated and freed for each row access (with some caching in between).

See Also

• BLOB and TEXT Data Types

• MEDIUMTEXT

• Data Type Storage Requirements

_{This page is licensed: GPLv2, originally from fill_help_tables.sql}