[Pdns-users] Why was content length increased?

[Nick Williams]

I'm upgrading to authoritative 3.4 and noticed that the records.content column has been increased from 255 characters to 64000 characters. Because my table is UTF-8, I get the following error:

mysql> ALTER TABLE records MODIFY content VARCHAR(64000);
ERROR 1074 (42000): Column length too big for column 'content' (max = 21845); use BLOB or TEXT instead

I know I can use latin1, but I tend to avoid any non-Unicode character sets completely, and would prefer to stick with UTF-8. Given that:

- What changed that required the increase from 255 to 64,000 characters?
- Is there any reason that I couldn't just use VARCHAR(21845)?
- Are there any performance implications to using TEXT instead of VARCHAR(64000)?

Thanks,

Nick