I have two fields: one to store an excerpt with a max size of 500 characters, and another to store a description with a max size of 10,000 characters.
What data types should I use, TEXT or VARCHAR? And why?
After MySQL 5.0.3 VARCHAR accepts ~65000 characters. But this does not tell why I should use one type and or the other.
I'm reasoning that I should use VARCHAR for the excerpt because I can assign a size limit, and TEXT for the description field as it's larger.