Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Storing large data elements

[Bryce Harrington]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, [iso-8859-1] Rob Scott wrote:

> The default table type on MySQL is MyISAM, and it is
> most commonly used as a static table, which is faster
> than a dynamic table for most corcumstances, and
> usually files arent spread all over the fs, unless you
> use the dynamic system.
> 
> So to answer your question, i dont think they do.

This is a good argument for not putting all of the text in
the database itself, directly.  Not the only argument, nor
necessarily the best one, but definitely a legitimate one.

However, in fact MySQL *does* have the capability for this.
Or at least, I found mention of it in the O'Reilly MySQL
manual (page 237).  MySQL appears to have several different
data types for strings.  For instance:

CHAR(len)    fixed
VARCHAR(len) 255
TINYTEXT     255 chars
TEXT         64KB
MEDIUMTEXT   16MB
LONGTEXT     4GB

That said, not all databases are able to store long runs of 
text, and I do not know how well supported these data types
are by DBI, JDBC, ODBC, etc.  There may be other issues
(like performance) as well.  

Bryce