Error: #1071 - Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes - mysql 5.0.91

Question

I am using mysql 5.0.91 and I need to save URLs ( some are small and some are very long ). I want to use varchar(2000) but I get an error:

#1

Answer 1

Do you use unique=True on your urls column? MySQL is building a unique index on that column, and the number of bytes that it uses per character varies depending on the encoding.

If it is UTF-16, for example, it will use 2 bytes per character, so your varchar(2000) column would be 4000 bytes, and as the error message says, the max key length is 1000 bytes.

So you can switch to UTF-8 and use varchar(900) instead to fix this problem.