On first glance, it looks like TEXT and VARCHAR can store the same information. However, there are fundamental differences between the way TEXT fields and VARCHAR fields work, which are important to take into consideration.

The maximum length of a "VARCHAR" is only restricted by the maximum row length. In most storage engines, the maximum row length is the maximum allowed by MySQL, which is 65,535 bytes. Only the NDB storage engine has a different maximum value.The "VARCHAR" data type has some overhead. If the length of "VARCHAR" is less than 255, one byte per row is used to store the actual length of the string. If the length of "VARCHAR" is greater than 255, the