On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 08:06:43PM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote: > But aren't there limits on the lengths of strings? I seem to recall > there being.
Depends on the database, Postgres limits a single field to 1GB[1] which should be enough to keep most people happy, MySQL seems to have a LONGTEXT datatype that could store up to 4GB of data but in practise seems to be limited to a few MB[2] without special effort. I'm not aware of any limits in Postgres like that of MySQL. As a test I've just tried to put a 256MB string into a TEXT column in Postgres in the most naive way possible then counted the number of characters in the field, everything went OK. I'm constantly amazed at why MySQL has such a larger mindshare than Postgres, Postgres just works and MySQL doesn't. > You could, of course, have one column for each tag up > to a maximum number of tags, and sort the tags lexicographically > (or by ID, if the IDs listed in a table of tags are used instead), > but that might be inefficient with the, say, max. 64 tags? That would help with Postgres, but not with MySQL. It's about as unidiomatic as you can get though! Sam [1] http://www.postgresql.org/about/ [2] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/packet-too-large.html
