Thread

Probably very simple question for somebody who knows.. I will have many entries in my project and i am considering the effects of textarea fields on the DB size in a future.

I red in another forum thread that the maximum size of Textarea field is by default some 64Kb.

But how much space does it really take? Is it always this full size? Or does it depend on the real size of the “contens / text” in the field? So if the field is eventually left empty, only some small amount of space is taken.

Paul,

That is the limit of content the field it can take. An empty one will take up zero space.

I will have many entries in my project and i am considering the effects of textarea fields on the DB size in a future.

Personally speaking I wouldn’t go into a project letting my technical requirements dictate what sort of site I can build. I would let the site I want to build dictate my technical requirements to give it the best chance.

Does that help?

Yes & Thanks!

Well, life is one big compromise .)

Btw. are there some known limits in amount of entries, above which it should be apropriate to use some other system?

I’ve just run into this 64K limit in migrating some content for a client. It appears that the publish/edit form silently truncates the content to fit… so I have a couple of questions:

1. What would you recommend if I need to store more than 64K in a field? A custom field type that’s stored as ‘MEDIUMTEXT’ (16MB maximum)? (I’m a developer, but a novice when it comes to EE development, so please excuse me if there’s an obvious solution).

2. Could the publish/edit form warn the user when the length of the content exceeds the maximum, or display, like this forum editor does, the number of characters remaining?

Thanks!

p.s. I’ve seen the database modification suggested in the aforementioned other thread, but wouldn’t that potentially create issues when upgrading later on?

Updating an existing field from TEXT to MEDIUMTEXT won’t hurt anything down the line. I’ve done it on a few sites with no issues.