brettp wrote on 40087541-10-29

Will need to examine the performance implications of this change as it will affect much more than blog posts.

Title changed from Change blog data type to mediumtext to Change elgg_entities description column to mediumtext by brettp on 40087541-10-29

Milestone changed to Needs Review by ewinslow on 41307719-09-29

cash wrote on 41488660-05-19

I've only seen one complaint ever on this in the forums. Individual sites can always adjust their own table structures. Doesn't seem worth the possible memory allocation issues (see the answer from Bill Karwin on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3516290/any-pitfalls-of-converting-mysql-text-field-to-mediumtext). I haven't established that the php mysql library allocates the maximum amount of memory for a result set, but it seems likely.

trac user mrclay wrote on 42461232-08-09

http://community.elgg.org/pg/forum/topic/881028/what-the-limit-of-characters-in-one-blog-or-page-article/

I think pushing the problem to site owners to maintain an alternate schema is avoiding the problem. Time to reevaluate this?

ewinslow wrote on 42461833-04-07

In favor of switching to mediumtext:

• Wordpress does it
• Multiple people have complained that the limit results in data loss
• Encouraging site owners to customize their DB schema is not Elggy

Opposed to switching:

• "Multiple" means 2 people in the last few years. It's extremely rare.
• Easy enough for site owners to customize their DB in the rare case this is actually needed (and it probably isn't actually needed)
• Increasing to a 16MB field could lead to memory allocation issues for lots of current site owners.
• There are workarounds (uploading a file, for example).

I don't find the "site owners can customize their DB" a very attractive suggestion, but I'm also not convinced this is really a need for Elgg. 64K is a whole lot of text, and perhaps uploading a file is a more appropriate course of action in the case where you need something longer anyways.

trac user mrclay wrote on 42461946-01-17

I think a wiki page wouls suffice as long as we promise to not add dependencies on TEXT type.