categorized question QandAEditors I have the following scenario (which you may be familiar with: <p> An online periodical is needed, similar in fashion to Slashdot and others. I suggested the best solution for it to be PERL/MySQL given the available resources ($). <p> Doing research I on development of similar sites I notice that one way to store an article/news text was to create several VARCHAR columns with the maximun of 255 characters for each one. The author would then break up the text to be posted into several chunks, 255 character long. <p> Then, upon reading the MySQL documentation in more detail, I noticed that it supports BLOB/TEXT column types that seemed to be specially suited for the kind of application I am dealing with. <p> So, the obvious question is, which is the preffered way to attack such problem. Or better yet, what are the pros and cons of each approach. <p> Thank you Monks. 1831