Introduction to MySQL TEXT Data Type

In MySQL, the TEXT data type is used to store longer text strings. It can store text strings with a maximum length of 65,535 characters. The TEXT data type has the following subtypes: TINYTEXT, TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT, and LONGTEXT, which differ in their maximum storage capacity.

Syntax

You can create a column of TEXT data type using the following syntax:

column_name TEXT [BINARY] [CHARACTER SET charset_name] [COLLATE collation_name]

Where:

• column_name is the name of the column.
• BINARY indicates that the column is binary, not character-based.
• charset_name is the name of the character set.
• collation_name is the sorting rule selected based on the character set name.

Use Cases

The TEXT data type is commonly used to store large amounts of text data, such as blog posts, comments, emails, product descriptions, etc. It can also be used to store text data like program code, XML documents, etc.

Example

Here is an example of creating a table with a TEXT data type column for storing blog posts:

CREATE TABLE blog_posts (
    id INT(11) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    title VARCHAR(255),
    content TEXT,
    author VARCHAR(50),
    created_at TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
);

Here is an example of inserting a blog post into the blog_posts table:

INSERT INTO blog_posts (title, content, author)
VALUES ('How to learn programming', 'It takes time and patience to learn programming.', 'Ming');

Here is an example of retrieving all blog posts from the blog_posts table:

SELECT * FROM blog_posts;

The result would be similar to:

+----+--------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+---------+---------------------+
| id | title                    | content                                          | author  | created_at          |
+----+--------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+---------+---------------------+
|  1 | How to learn programming | It takes time and patience to learn programming. | Ming | 2023-03-13 00:00:00 |
+----+--------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+---------+---------------------+

Conclusion

The TEXT data type is a data type used for storing longer text data, with a maximum length of 65,535 characters. It is commonly used for storing text data like blog posts, comments, emails, product descriptions, etc.