Page 3 - Simple Queries in SQL

• BINARY
• VARBINARY
• BLOB
• TEXT
• ENUM
• SET

CHAR and VARCHAR Types
The CHAR and VARCHAR types are similar but differ in the way they are stored and retrieved. They
also differ in maximum length and in whether trailing spaces are retained.

Types Description Display Range in characters
Format
CHAR Contains non-binary strings. Length Trailing spaces The length can be any value
is fixed as you declare while are removed. from 0 to 255.
creating a table. When stored, they
are right-padded with spaces to the
specified length.
VARCHAR Contains non-binary strings. As stored. A value from 0 to 255 before
Columns are variable-length MySQL 5.0.3, and 0 to
strings. 65,535 in 5.0.3 and later
versions.

BINARY and VARBINARY Types
The BINARY and VARBINARY types are similar to CHAR and VARCHAR, except that they contain
binary strings rather than nonbinary strings.

Types Description Range in bytes

BINARY Contains binary strings. 0 to 255

VARBINARY Contains binary strings. A value from 0 to 255 before MySQL 5.0.3, and 0 to
65,535 in 5.0.3 and later versions.

BLOB and TEXT Types
A BLOB is a binary large object (such as images or other types of files) that can hold a variable
amount of data. There are four types of BLOB, 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.

Types Description Categories Range
BLOB Large binary object that TINYBLOB Maximum length of 255 characters.
containing a variable BLOB Maximum length of 65535
amount of data. Values characters.
are treated as binary MEDIUMBLOB Maximum length of 16777215
strings. You don't need characters.
to specify length while LONGBLOB Maximum length of 4294967295
creating a column. characters