char bytes of memory. * TEXT and BLOB columns are stored with a pointer (4 or 8 bytes) + a 1-4 bytes length. The TEXT data is only stored once. This means that internally TEXT uses less memory for each open table but instead has the additional overhead that each TEXT object needs to be allocated and freed for each row access (with some caching in between). URL: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/varchar/https://mariadb.com/kb/en/varchar/