Q:

MySQL TEXT or VARCHAR

We have a very large historical table that contains a column with at most 500 UTF8 characters, and the disk space grows really fast!
We're having at least 2 million rows a day... and we were wondering which would do a better job (mostly in storage but in performance as well)? TEXT or VARCHAR(512)?

A:

VARCHAR is probably preferable in your case from both the storage and performance perspective.  View this oft-reposted article.

