MySQL: Large VARCHAR vs. TEXT?

Question

I\'ve got a messages table in MySQL which records messages between users. Apart from the typical ids and message types (all integer types) I need to save the actual message

Answer 1

• TEXT and BLOB may by stored off the table with the table just having a pointer to the location of the actual storage. Where it is stored depends on lots of things like data size, columns size, row_format, and MySQL version.

• VARCHAR is stored inline with the table. VARCHAR is faster when the size is reasonable, the tradeoff of which would be faster depends upon your data and your hardware, you'd want to benchmark a real-world scenario with your data.