licentious radio

Friday, February 14, 2003
[5:13:44 PM]

Man! I just wasted half an hour trying to create a table in MySQL with a TEXT field.

My O'Reilly MySQL & mSQL book has a table on page 98 that makes it look like you give TEXT a character size. Then I glance at the text below, which talked about a performance hit if the contents of the field went over the size you specify. Alas, the text below the table was talking about mSQL, and the table itself appears just to be a lie. Maybe it's out of date.

Anyway....

create table test (item text(500) );

gives you this helpful message:

ERROR 1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax near '(500) )' at line 1

It should be:

create table test (item text);