TEXT Data Type in MySQL

TEXT data objects are useful for storing long-form text strings in a MySQL database. Followings are some point about TEXT data type −

• TEXT is the family of column type intended as high-capacity character storage.
• The actual TEXT column type is of four types-TINYTEXT, TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT and LONGTEXT.
• The four TEXT types are very similar to each other; the only difference is the maximum amount of data each can store.
• The smallest TEXT type, TINYTEXT shares the same character length as VARCHAR.
• TEXT values are treated as character strings.
• TEXT has character set other than binary character set and collation.
• The comparisons and sorting are based on the collation of its character set.
• Truncation of excess trailing spaces from values to be inserted into TEXT columns always generates a warning, regardless of the SQL mode.
• A TEXT family column is just like a VARCHAR.
• TEXT column cannot have DEFAULT value.

Example

 Following example shows how to declare a column as TEXT.

mysql> Create table magzine(id INT, title Varchar(25), Introduction TEXT);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.16 sec)

mysql> Describe magzine;
+--------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field        | Type        | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+--------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| id           | int(11)     | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| title        | varchar(25) | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| Introduction | text        | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
+--------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
3 rows in set (0.11 sec)