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Q&A How to calculate how much data is stored in a MySQL column?

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 valu...

posted 3y ago by Alexei‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Alexei‭

Answer
#2: Post edited by user avatar Alexei‭ · 2020-10-22T18:55:12Z (over 3 years ago)
fixed the max width for UTF-8
  • [The reference](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/storage-requirements.html#data-types-storage-reqs-strings) 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](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1790570/2780791) from Stack Overflow suggests that a character might take up 1-3 bytes depending on the actual character / collation.
  • [The reference](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/storage-requirements.html#data-types-storage-reqs-strings) 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](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1790570/2780791) from Stack Overflow suggests that a character might take up 1-4 bytes depending on the actual character / collation.
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Alexei‭ · 2020-10-20T17:04:48Z (over 3 years ago)
[The reference](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/storage-requirements.html#data-types-storage-reqs-strings) 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](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1790570/2780791) from Stack Overflow suggests that a character might take up 1-3 bytes depending on the actual character / collation.