MySQL CLOB Tools - Import, Export, View and Edit

• Import file data to MySQL TEXT (CLOB)
• Export MySQL TEXT (CLOB) data to files
• View and edit MySQL TEXT data
• Batch export MySQL query results TEXT data to files
• Batch update MySQL table TEXT data from files
• Batch insert MySQL table TEXT data from files

MySQL CLOB - type family and size limits

Type in MySQL / MariaDB	Maximum size
TINYTEXT	255 bytes
TEXT	64 KB
MEDIUMTEXT	16 MB
LONGTEXT	4 GB

CLOB versus BLOB in MySQL / MariaDB

MySQL has no type called CLOB - the TEXT family takes its place. Both measure length in bytes, but TEXT is decoded with the column character set and takes part in sorting and comparison, while BLOB is treated as opaque binary.

What limits you first

The ceiling you actually hit is not the 4 GB column limit but max_allowed_packet (4 MB by default on MySQL 5.7, 64 MB on 8.0). A single value larger than that fails at the protocol layer.

CLOB from the command line

• Export: mysqldump (writes BLOBs as hex by default) or SELECT ... INTO DUMPFILE
• Import: LOAD_FILE() - restricted by secure_file_priv - or mysqlimport

Things that bite with CLOB in MySQL / MariaDB

• Leave max_allowed_packet at its default and the 4 GB LONGBLOB ceiling is unreachable
• BLOB and TEXT columns cannot have a default value and cannot be indexed whole - only a prefix index such as col(255)
• mysqldump writes BLOB values as hex literals, so the dump is about twice the size of the data; --hex-blob just makes that explicit
• InnoDB stores large values off-page - with ROW_FORMAT=COMPACT or REDUNDANT only 768 bytes stay in the row