Simply change a database column because all others are that type makes no sense.

The main different for SQL between text and varchar/char is that the text is saved on another position in the datafile and varchar/char in the with all other columns. This means a performance impact on access because the database server must seek the text field on another position and load it. So this should only be used if really needed. ymmv

I understand that, however there have been quite a few reports of people having issues with truncated data in that column, myself included, mainly due to heavy usage of plugins which store their configuration there.

We've had various requests to change many of these fields

#19618 fields
#24631 modules

etc. And we've closed them all. I'm not interested in killing our performance so some badly written plugins can hack into our db structure rather than storing their data properly. If you want you can make the error handling a bit nicer (e.g. #24635 but that's about all I'm prepared to accept)

ok, fine with me. 😄

I'm not against this change, but we should evaluate the drawbacks. Since ssd has much faster access on random bits then hdds this performance issue maybe not longer valid with ssds.

If you are really interested in this change maybe you can find some benchmarks or documentation on this.

I'm against this change :)

The attribs column for content may be used for custom parameters/ plugins and then the constraint of varchar(5120) is not enough.

For example my client uses a plugin with which he may add video links. Data is then saved into custom field of attribs column.

When too much data is put in, data is truncated while saving into database and JSON format is broken.

When opening article either in site or backend application shows an errror RuntimeException: Error decoding JSON data: Control character error and it's possible to fix it only via database editor.

IMHO since Joomla is using attribs and params columns for JSON objects, it's type should be TEXT