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Reading this question, a doubt popped into my head:

  • char and varchar can store up to 255 chars
  • text can store up to 65k chars
  • char size in bytes is number of chars
  • varchar size in bytes is number of chars used + 1

So how much bytes does TEXT actually occupy? ~65KB or number of chars used + 1?

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    stackoverflow.com/search?q=[mysql]+text+vs+varchar Commented Jan 18, 2010 at 3:57
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    varchar size in bytes is number of chars used + 1 This actually depends on the encoding used in the table. It could, for example, be ((# of chars) * 2) + 1 for 2-byte characters. Remember it's number of characters not number of bytes. Commented Jun 26, 2010 at 0:37

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TEXT is a variable length datatype, with a maximum of 65,000 characters.

LONGTEXT can be used for over 4 trillion characters.

To answer your question: it's a variable lenght, and it will only occupy the amount of characters you store.

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Plus a little bit of overhead to indicate that length - and LONGTEXT has more overhead than TEXT has more overhead than VARCHAR.
True: "LONG" in "LONGTEXT" actually indicates how much characters. A long value is 8 bytes, so the overhead is 8 bytes. Though it's insignificant, thus I didn't mention it.
Logically, TEXT is also stored as a BLOB
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TEXT occupies a number actual length of your data + 2 bytes.

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Soooo if you're storing 256 or more characters, VARCHAR and TEXT take up the same amount of storage space?

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