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The storage requirements for each of the data types supported by MySQL are listed here by category.
The maximum size of a row in a MyISAM
table is 65,534 bytes. Each BLOB
and TEXT
column accounts for only five to nine bytes toward this size. This limitation may be shared by other storage engines as well.
Important: For tables using the NDBCluster
storage engine, there is the factor of 4-byte alignment to be taken into account when calculating storage requirements. This means that all NDB
data storage is done in multiples of 4 bytes. Thus, a column value that would take 15 bytes in a table using a storage engine other than NDB
requires 16 bytes in an NDB
table. This requirement applies in addition to any other considerations that are discussed in this section. For example, in NDBCluster
tables, the TINYINT
, SMALLINT
, MEDIUMINT
, and INTEGER
(INT
) column types each require 4 bytes storage per record due to the alignment factor.
In addition, when calculating storage requirements for Cluster tables, you must remember that every table using the NDBCluster
storage engine requires a primary key; if no primary key is defined by the user, then a “hidden” primary key will be created by NDB
. This hidden primary key consumes 31-35 bytes per table record.
You may find the ndb_size.pl
utility to be useful for estimating NDB
storage requirements. This Perl script connects to a current MySQL (non-Cluster) database and creates a report on how much space that database would require if it used the NDBCluster
storage engine. See Section 15.8.14, “ndb_size.pl — NDBCluster Size Requirement Estimator”, for more information.
Storage Requirements for Numeric Types
Data Type | Storage Required |
TINYINT | 1 byte |
SMALLINT | 2 bytes |
MEDIUMINT | 3 bytes |
INT , INTEGER | 4 bytes |
BIGINT | 8 bytes |
FLOAT( | 4 bytes if 0 <= p <= 24, 8 bytes if 25 <= p <= 53 |
FLOAT | 4 bytes |
DOUBLE [PRECISION] , REAL | 8 bytes |
DECIMAL( , NUMERIC( | Varies; see following discussion |
BIT( | approximately (M +7)/8 bytes |
The storage requirements for DECIMAL
(and NUMERIC
) are version-specific:
As of MySQL 5.0.3, values for DECIMAL
columns are represented using a binary format that packs nine decimal (base 10) digits into four bytes. Storage for the integer and fractional parts of each value are determined separately. Each multiple of nine digits requires four bytes, and the “leftover” digits require some fraction of four bytes. The storage required for excess digits is given by the following table:
Leftover Digits | Number of Bytes |
0 | 0 |
1 | 1 |
2 | 1 |
3 | 2 |
4 | 2 |
5 | 3 |
6 | 3 |
7 | 4 |
8 | 4 |
Before MySQL 5.0.3, DECIMAL
columns are represented as strings and storage requirements are: M
+2 bytes if D
> 0,
bytes if M
+1D
= 0, D
+2 if M
< D
Storage Requirements for Date and Time Types
Data Type | Storage Required |
DATE | 3 bytes |
TIME | 3 bytes |
DATETIME | 8 bytes |
TIMESTAMP | 4 bytes |
YEAR | 1 byte |
The storage requirements shown in the table arise from the way that MySQL represents temporal values:
DATE
: A three-byte integer packed as DD
+ MM
Ч32 + YYYY
Ч16Ч32
TIME
: A three-byte integer packed as DD
Ч24Ч3600 + HH
Ч3600 + MM
Ч60 + SS
DATETIME
: Eight bytes:
A four-byte integer packed as YYYY
Ч10000 + MM
Ч100 + DD
A four-byte integer packed as HH
Ч10000 + MM
Ч100 + SS
TIMESTAMP
: A four-byte integer representing seconds UTC since the epoch ('1970-01-01 00:00:00'
UTC)
YEAR
: A one-byte integer
Storage Requirements for String Types
Data Type | Storage Required |
CHAR( | characters, 0 <= 255 |
VARCHAR( | L characters + 1 byte, where and 0 <= 255 or L characters + 2 bytes, where and 256 <= 65535. Prior to MySQL 5.0.3: L characters + 1 byte, where and 0 <= 255. |
BINARY( | bytes, 0 <= 255 |
VARBINARY( | L + 1 bytes, where and 0 <= 255 or L + 2 bytes, where and 256 <= 65535. Prior to MySQL 5.0.3: L + 1 bytes, where and 0 <= 255. |
TINYBLOB | L + 1 bytes, where L < 28 |
TINYTEXT | L characters + 1 byte, where L < 28 |
BLOB | L + 2 bytes, where L < 216 |
TEXT | L characters + 2 bytes, where L < 216 |
MEDIUMBLOB | L + 3 bytes, where L < 224 |
MEDIUMTEXT | L characters + 3 bytes, where L < 224 |
LONGBLOB | L + 4 bytes, where L < 232 |
LONGTEXT | L characters + 4 bytes, where L < 232 |
ENUM(' | 1 or 2 bytes, depending on the number of enumeration values (65,535 values maximum) |
SET(' | 1, 2, 3, 4, or 8 bytes, depending on the number of set members (64 members maximum) |
For the CHAR
, VARCHAR
, and TEXT
types, the values L
and M
in the preceding table should be interpreted as number of characters, and lengths for these types in column specifications indicate the number of characters. For example, to store a TINYTEXT
value requires L
characters to store the value plus one byte to store the length of the value.
To calculate the number of bytes used to store a particular CHAR
, VARCHAR
, or TEXT
column value, you must take into account the character set used for that column and whether the value contains multi-byte characters. In particular, when using the utf8
Unicode character set, you must keep in mind that not all utf8
characters use the same number of bytes and can require up to three bytes per character. For a breakdown of the storage used for different categories of utf8
characters, see Section 10.7, “Unicode Support”.
VARCHAR
, VARBINARY
, and the BLOB
and TEXT
types are variable-length types. For each, the storage requirements depend on these factors:
The actual length of the column value
The column's maximum possible length
The character set used for the column, because some character sets contain multi-byte characters
For example, a VARCHAR(10)
column can hold a string with a maximum length of 10 characters. Assuming that the column uses the latin1
character set (one byte per character), the actual storage required is the length of the string (L
), plus one byte to record the length of the string. For the string 'abcd'
, L
is 4 and the storage requirement is five bytes. If the same column was instead declared as VARCHAR(500)
, the string 'abcd'
requires 4 + 2 = 6 bytes. Two bytes rather than one are required to store the column length because the maximum length is greater than 255 characters.
Note: In MySQL 5.0.3 and later, the effective maximum number of bytes that can be stored in a VARCHAR
or VARBINARY
column is 65,532. For a VARCHAR
column that stores multi-byte characters, the maximum effective number of characters is less. For example, utf8
characters can require up to three bytes per character, so a VARCHAR
column that uses the utf8
character set can be declared to be a maximum of 21,844 characters.
As of MySQL 5.0.3, the NDBCLUSTER
engine supports only fixed-width columns. This means that a VARCHAR
column from a table in a MySQL Cluster will behave as follows:
If the size of the column is fewer than 256 characters, the column requires one byte extra storage per row.
If the size of the column is 256 characters or more, the column requires two bytes extra storage per row.
The number of bytes required per character varies according to the character set used. For example, if a VARCHAR(100)
column in a Cluster table uses the utf8
character set, each character requires 3 bytes storage. This means that each record in such a column takes up 100 Ч 3 + 1 = 301 bytes for storage, regardless of the length of the string actually stored in any given record. For a VARCHAR(1000)
column in a table using the NDBCLUSTER
storage engine with the utf8
character set, each record will use 1000 Ч 3 + 2 = 3002 bytes storage; that is, the column is 1,000 characters wide, each character requires 3 bytes storage, and each record has a 2-byte overhead because 1,000 >= 256.
The BLOB
and TEXT
types require 1, 2, 3, or 4 bytes to record the length of the column value, depending on the maximum possible length of the type. See Section 11.4.3, “The BLOB
and TEXT
Types”.
TEXT
and BLOB
columns are implemented differently in the NDB Cluster storage engine, wherein each row in a TEXT
column is made up of two separate parts. One of these is of fixed size (256 bytes), and is actually stored in the original table. The other consists of any data in excess of 256 bytes, which is stored in a hidden table. The rows in this second table are always 2,000 bytes long. This means that the size of a TEXT
column is 256 if size
<= 256 (where size
represents the size of the row); otherwise, the size is 256 + size
+ (2000 – (size
– 256) % 2000).
The size of an ENUM
object is determined by the number of different enumeration values. One byte is used for enumerations with up to 255 possible values. Two bytes are used for enumerations having between 256 and 65,535 possible values. See Section 11.4.4, “The ENUM
Type”.
The size of a SET
object is determined by the number of different set members. If the set size is N
, the object occupies (
bytes, rounded up to 1, 2, 3, 4, or 8 bytes. A N
+7)/8SET
can have a maximum of 64 members. See Section 11.4.5, “The SET
Type”.