What is blob and what is text? What are the differences?
When do I need to use blob and when do I need text as data type?
Because for blob and text, there are mediumblob == mediumtext, smallblob == small text. Do they even have the same meaning?
And look at this MEDIUMBLOB, MEDIUMTEXT L + 3 bytes, where L < 224.
What is L?
Blob datatypes stores binary objects like images while text datatypes stores text objects like articles of webpages
A BLOB is a binary string to hold a variable amount of data. For the most part BLOB's are used to hold the actual image binary instead of the path and file info. Text is for large amounts of string characters. Normally a blog or news article would constitute to a TEXT field
L in this case is used stating the storage requirement. (Length|Size + 3) as long as it is less than 224.
BLOB stores binary data which are more than 2 GB. Max size for BLOB is 4 GB. Binary data means unstructured data i.e images audio files vedio files digital signature
Text is used to store large string.
TEXT and CHAR or nchar that will typically be converted to plain text so you can only store text like strings.
BLOB and BINARY which mean you can store binary data such as images simply store bytes.
According to High-performance Mysql book:
The only difference between the BLOB and TEXT families is that BLOB types store binary data with no collation or character set, but TEXT types have a character set and collation.
Source: Stackoverflow.com