Re: Feature freeze imminent

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