[OSM-dev] Field lengths in Rails port

[John Smith]

On 1 July 2010 00:32, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 08:11, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 30 June 2010 17:46, Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Postgres ignores them, IIRC, since it doesn't have such a concept. I'm
>>> sure one day some numbers will get too big for mysql, but hey.
>>
>> Doesn't MySQL support BigInt (64bit) and UUID (128bit) numbers?
>
> Yes, but it generally handles larger types much worse than real
> databases. E.g. you can't have an index for a TEXT, but you can index
> VARCHAR(255) on InnoDB.

I thought we were only discussing numeric types, but I think you can
index varchar regardless of the DB type, and you avoid TEXT fields
like the plague since it will use the hdd to build the query...