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How to calculate how much data is stored in a MySQL column?
I am considering either removing some columns or changing the datatypes if I could significantly reduce the amount of storage that is currently used by those columns. Some of the columns are ints and some are varchar.
How do I calculate (preferably in megabytes) the amount of storage a column uses?
1 answer
The reference indicated by jcsahnwaldt indeed specifies the space required by VARCHAR columns, namely (L = string length):
L + 1 bytes if column values require 0 − 255 bytes, L + 2 bytes if values may require more than 255 bytes
However, I think this is true only for non-Unicode characters and expect to have more depending on collation. This rather old answer from Stack Overflow suggests that a character might take up 1-4 bytes depending on the actual character / collation.
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