title: Which MySQL datatype is more space efficient for scalable apps? TEXT or VARCHAR?
body: <p>I'm building a highly scalable app, and I need to know which data type to use for small strings (50-1000 chars). I heard that VARCHAR is fixed sized and therefore might be faster, but with TEXT, chars might be stored in a seperate CLOB, and only a pointer in the row data.  This would be smaller, but would it have any significant performance hit?</p>