Working with MediaWiki software - How do I change the length of a page title from 255 bytes to indefinite in MySQL?

Question

I am trying to use unicode characters (Tibetan script, but similar issues must arise for Chinese, Devanagari, etc.) in MediaWiki software to create page names. However, after a certain number of Tibetan characters the system refuses to create a page because the settings in the underlying MySQL database allow for page titles to be only 255 bytes in length. I am not sure which tables and which fields to change in order to allow for longer page titles. Does anyone know?

Answer 1

There is no indefinite-length column type in MySQL (or indeed in most systems). If VARCHAR(255) isn't enough for you, consider a TEXT (64Kb), MEDIUMTEXT (16Mb) or LONGTEXT (4Gb) column.

If you are using a UTF-8 collation for the column (and you should be!), then a VARCHAR(255) column will still store 255 characters regardless of whether they're Latin, Devanagari or something else. It's only if you're got your UTF-8 strings being stored as bytes (typically latin_1_swedish) that they will take more characters from the varchar limit than Latin letters.