Changing qa_posts>content from VARCHAR to TEXT to write more text - consequences?

Question

I am in a situation where the 8000 characters allowed are not sufficient for posting content. I tried to increase the 8000 to 20000 but get the mysql error notice:

1118 - Row size too large. The maximum row size for the used table type, not counting BLOBs, is 65535. You have to change some columns to TEXT or BLOBs

When I change VARCHAR to TEXT, what are the consequences? Will q2a get any problems with that?

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EDIT: I changed 'content' from VARCHAR to MEDIUMTEXT now and it seems to work.

With MediumText you get: max. ~16MB – 16,777,215 character – around 4,194,303 utf-chars

If you need to do the same, after the DB changes, you need to edit file qa-db-maxima.php:

@define('QA_DB_MAX_CONTENT_LENGTH', 500000); // before 8000 (varchar)

 

Comments

This question is still open, can somebody tell me if it will slow down q2a? Will changing qa_posts field "content" from "varchar(8000)" to "Mediumtext" slow down q2a?

Okay, found it myself: http://stackoverflow.com/a/24156661/1066234

Answer 1

I guess you should create a clone of your site on localhost to be sure, but recalling the code on db read and write functions I think you will have no problem.

but of course you will have to edit 'qa-db-install.php' file each time you want to update your Q2A to be sure that it wont overright previous change and trim content.

Comments

Thanks for the hint with the update problem!