What is the difference between varchar and text?

Question

What is the difference between data types var char and text in database design?

Answer 1

The main difference is than TEXT has a fixed max size of 2¹⁶-1 = 65535 characters. VARCHAR has a variable max size M up to M = 2¹⁶-1.

Answer 2

There are very few differences between VARCHAR and TEXT. Most are not really important.

Summary of *TEXT, CHAR, and VARCHAR:

• Never use TINYTEXT.
• Almost never use CHAR -- it is fixed length; each character is the max length of the CHARACTER SET (eg, 4 bytes/character for utf8mb4).
• With CHAR, use CHARACTER SET ascii unless you know otherwise.
• VARCHAR(n) will truncate at n characters; TEXT will truncate at some number of bytes. (But, do you want truncation?)
• *TEXT may slow down complex SELECTs due to how temp tables are handled.

Answer 3

VARCHAR column can be given with any size, but it is limited by the maximum size of a single row of data (including all columns), which is 64KB (2¹⁶-1) .TEXT columns do not add to the maximum row size, because the actual text is not stored with the rest of the row.