A BLOB
is a binary large object that can hold a variable amount of data. The four BLOB
types are TINYBLOB
, BLOB
, MEDIUMBLOB
, and LONGBLOB
. These differ only in the maximum length of the values they can hold. The four TEXT
types are TINYTEXT
, TEXT
, MEDIUMTEXT
, and LONGTEXT
. These correspond to the four BLOB
types and have the same maximum lengths and storage requirements.
BLOB doesn't have a character set, but TEXT has.
Keeping in mind the caveats above about max packet size and RAM, here are the sizes of each of the text types:
TINYBLOB, TINYTEXT:
2^8 or 256 bytes
BLOB, TEXT:
2^16 or 65536 bytes (64 kiB)
MEDIUMBLOB, MEDIUMTEXT:
2^24 or 16777216 bytes (16 MiB)
LONGBLOB, LONGTEXT:
2^32 or 4294967296 bytes (4 GiB)