 <p>probably better off using one of the TEXT datatypes. </p> <pre><code>TINYTEXT 256 bytes TEXT 65,535 bytes ~64kb MEDIUMTEXT 16,777,215 bytes ~16MB LONGTEXT 4,294,967,295 bytes ~4GB </code></pre> <p>It also depends on your version of MySQL. </p> <p>see: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1303476/is-a-varchar20000-valid-in-mysql">Is a VARCHAR(20000) valid in MySQL?</a></p>