Oct. 27, 2005
6:03 p.m.
On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 09:25 -0700, Mark Sapiro wrote:
There is an issue however in that the representation can exceed 255 characters if there is a cookie and/or a longish member address.
The first reference above seems unclear on this. It says
Values in VARCHAR columns are variable-length strings. The length can be specified as 1 to 255 before MySQL 4.0.2 and 0 to 255 as of MySQL 4.0.2.
but the next paragraph says
In contrast to CHAR, VARCHAR values are stored using only as many characters as are needed, plus one byte to record the length (two bytes for columns that are declared with a length longer than 255).
I don't know if means you can actually have VARCHAR data longer than 255 or not.
VARCHAR is upper bound limited, you cannot store more than 255 characters in a VARCHAR. However the TEXT data type are virtually unlimited (as is the BLOB, or Binary Large Object, don't you love the name?) But since the bounce data is converted to text the TEXT data type makes more sense than BLOB.
John Dennis <jdennis@redhat.com>