Default length of text field(multiline)

RAJ October 13, 2015

can you please let me know the length of string that the description or text field(multiline) field currently supports?

11 answers

1 accepted

3 votes
Answer accepted
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
October 13, 2015

In useful terms, "big enough".  It can hold more text than any human would find readable.

4 votes
Tyler C. Borg November 23, 2015

After researching I found the answer Atlassian OnDemand uses Postgresql https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/database-and-ip-information-744721662.html.
The limitation for Postgresql text fields is approximately 1 GB. http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/datatype-character.html
Hope this helps Arjun.

Thanks and Regards,
Tyler Borg

Mykhailo May 16, 2016

It are unconfirmed assumptions. There should be official documentation for this.

2 votes
Tyler C. Borg November 20, 2015

I understand you must not be a technical user so this won't make sense to you but I am designing an internal database that we transfer data from the JIRA CLOUD API, and when I make SQL table columns they want an exact length. Big Enough is not a valid size for a nvarchar column. For purposes of data storage and compatibility in the data transfer application exact length is a very essential piece of information.

0 votes
Janco Hoekstra June 20, 2019

I sure agree to the human factor, uunless this human is willing to do harm. What about someone who wants to serios slow down the system or provoke something like a crash?

By filling up the textfields your database is going to be an enormous monster that is practicaly not managable anymore.

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 16, 2016

Same answer applies.  If your add-on is dumping over-large data into a field, it's a complete waste of time and you're doing the wrong thing.

0 votes
Mykhailo May 16, 2016

@Nic Brough [Adaptavist] as an add-on developer I have to know such information to apply these limits to the data which was provided by my add-on and is going to be saved into the standard custom field.

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
November 21, 2015

Nearly. What I'm trying to say is that trying to put a number on it is pointless. 4000 isn't enough, I know of many systems that have gone over that. But equally, you won't find systems that use the *physical* limit because humans simply won't enter 65-ish copies of the world's best-selling book (uncompressed), you can be pretty sure they won't read all of it, and the web-server is likely to time-out before rendering it all. But you can't guarantee where it will land between " a couple of words" and "a long rambling description of something". So, yet again, I have to say "don't limit it". It's the wrong thing to do, and it's simply not necessary in any modern database anyway.

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
November 20, 2015

I'm technical enough to understand that, but the answer is still "big enough". What you're trying to do is limit something that you don't know to a number you can't know. The really simple answer is that you have to assume 2^32-1 bytes, because the field is technically only limited by the size of the database field. (Oh, I'm also technical enough to point out that someone is probably doing something very wrong if they are asking you for "an exact length". It strongly implies someone has done a database introduction course and not quite got it)

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
November 18, 2015

Why? It's utterly useless information because over-large text fields are useless to you.

0 votes
Tyler C. Borg November 18, 2015

I also need an answer to this question in the form of a specific length.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer
TAGS
AUG Leaders

Atlassian Community Events