<p>Char's are great because they are fixed size and thus make for a faster table. They are however limited to 255 characters. I want to hold 500 characters but a blob is variable length and that's not what I want.</p>

<p>Is there some way to have a fixed length field of 500 characters in MySQL or am I going to have to use 2 char fields?</p>

[{'answer_id': 5079, 'author': 'GateKiller', 'author_id': 383, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/383', 'pm_score': 4, 'selected': True, 'text': "<p>I would suggest using a varchar(500). Even though varchar isn't a fixed length, the database should reserve the correct amount of space. You shouldn't notice any performance difference using varchar(500) over 2xchar(255).</p>\n\n<p>You're also probably going to cause extra overhead by joining two char fields together.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 5112, 'author': 'Christian Lescuyer', 'author_id': 341, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/341', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<blockquote>\n  <p>I would suggest using a varchar(500)</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>... if you have MySQL 5.0.3 or higher. In previous versions, VARCHAR was restricted to 255 characters.</p>\n\n<p>Also, CHAR and VARCHAR do not work the same regarding trailing spaces. Be sure to read <a href="http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/char.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">10.4.1. The CHAR and VARCHAR Types</a> (this is for MySQL 5.0).</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 44064, 'author': 'Jeff Cuscutis', 'author_id': 2277, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2277', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>You're worrying too much about internal implementation details. Don't pre-optimize. </p>\n\n<p>Go with <code>VARCHAR(500)</code></p>\n"}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/5075', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1384652/']