On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Gutza gutza@moongate.ro wrote:
TEXT (and related) fields have always been iffier than fixed-length types as far as performance goes, so I guess that's why everybody's steering clear of those if at all possible (think article titles and all related queries, for instance).
There are various differences, yes. For instance, TEXT rows can't exist in MEMORY tables, so they force filesorts to go to disk (if the row contents are being explicitly sorted instead of just row pointers, anyway). If we upgraded to MySQL 5, we could use VARBINARY(65535) instead. For the time being, I suspect the performance problems would be tolerable: it's not like we're searching or indexing these, we're just retrieving them for results.