# Having multiple text column vs single text column

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/having-multiple-text-column-vs-single-text-column/2714>\
**Category:** Other MySQL® Questions\
**Created:** [May 28, 2013, 12:51am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/having-multiple-text-column-vs-single-text-column/2714 "2013-05-28T00:51:49Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![onlyrohits](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/onlyrohits/32/935_2.png) [@onlyrohits](https://forums.percona.com/u/onlyrohits)\
**Post date:** [May 28, 2013, 12:51am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/having-multiple-text-column-vs-single-text-column/2714/1 "2013-05-28T00:51:49Z")

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Having multiple text column vs single text column or a medium text column, which should handle things better?

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**Author:** ![revin](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/revin/32/824_2.png) [@revin](https://forums.percona.com/u/revin)\
**Post date:** [May 29, 2013, 9:36pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/having-multiple-text-column-vs-single-text-column/2714/2 "2013-05-29T21:36:18Z")

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@onlyrohits,

I assume this is InnoDB? One reason to go with single TEXT field is performance. A single TEXT field will only maintain one singly-linked-list of overflow pages, while multiple TEXT columns means if several of them requires overflow pages then the work is increased. Note that each TEXT column will have its own set of overflow pages, if these overflow pages do not have a good fill factor, you will be wasting disk space too.

[url][http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-row-format-overview.html[/url]](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-row-format-overview.html%5B/url%5D)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![revin](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/revin/32/824_2.png) [@revin](https://forums.percona.com/u/revin)\
**Post date:** [May 29, 2013, 9:37pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/having-multiple-text-column-vs-single-text-column/2714/3 "2013-05-29T21:37:49Z")

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Oh, and this too [url][http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/02/09/blob-storage-in-innodb/[/url]](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/02/09/blob-storage-in-innodb/%5B/url%5D) 🙂