I was looking into the storage requirement for the various data types and got confused by following comment:
'For the CHAR, VARCHAR, and TEXT types, L and M in the preceding table should be interpreted as number of bytes before MySQL 4.1 and as number of characters thereafter.' Then I looked into other pages like http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/string-type-overview.html <http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/string-type-overview.html> and got more confuse. How it would be possible to use the same storage size to store the equal number of characters and byte, if a character is not just a byte long? For example UTF-8 based Unicode character may take 1 to 4 bytes. Any help would be highly appreciated.
