How many characters can Long Text field store?

[WilliamPorter]

Have asked Google, the Duck, even Bing, and can’t find an answer to this question: How much wood would a woodchuck… No, sorry, that’s a different question for a different time. My current question is: How much text can be stored in a Long Text field (of a single record)?

[Zack_S]

100,000 characters

support.airtable.com

Long Text Field - Overview | Airtable Support

A long text field is great when you need to keep notes or multiple lines of text in each record. You can enter new lines into a long text...

[WilliamPorter]

Thanks for fast reply, Zack! I did glance at that article but didn’t see that last line.

What happens if (somehow) a user pastes more text into a field than it can hold?

[Zack_S]

An error occurs

[WilliamPorter]

Thanks. I didn’t want to test this for fear it would cause my base to catch on fire and self-destruct.

Thanks again for your quick help!

William

[Bill_French]

WilliamPorterTech:

How much text can be stored in a Long Text field (of a single record)?

146,285.714 at an average 70% compression. :winking_face:

[kuovonne]

WilliamPorterTech:

for fear it would cause my base to catch on fire and self-destruct.

Has anything like this ever happened to you?

The closest I’ve come is runnaway automations or cascading issues with schema changes. Attempting to change the value in a single cell has never made my base self-destruct.

[WilliamPorter]

Don’t know how to take your response, Bill. You’re the kind of guy who would actually know that it’s 146,285.714 at 70% compression. But you added that smiley face, so I think you were trying to pull my leg. :mechanical_leg:

On a non-ironic, non-sarcastic note: After getting the info from @Zack_S , I created an experimental base and tested this. Pasted about 53,000 characters into a long text field — no problems. Copied a different text block of 52,000 characters and tried to paste into the same field: The base froze. By “froze”, I mean I got a “Page not responding” error. I kept clicking the “Wait” button, but eventually it was clear I had to force exit the page, which I did.

The good news is that this 100,000 character limit seems to be per field, per record. So if it happens on occasion that the primary Notes field in a given record is getting “full”, I can move its text to a “NotesArchived” field and start from zero.

[WilliamPorter]

kuovonne:

Has anything like this ever happened to you?

I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. “Catch on fire” was a bit of drollery, although I have made more than a couple of laptops get fairly warm in the past. As for self-destruct, yes, some time ago (15 years?) I had a FileMaker database gag, crash, and become corrupted during a very large ingestion of data. And I kind of understood what I was dealing with there in terms of the hardware. I have no idea how capable Airtable’s servers are (presumably they’re very capable) but I don’t like to take risks for the heck of it.

My conversion process from FileMaker to Airtable seems to be taking a few years longer than I expected, but I’m continuing with it quite happily. But these limits are a new thing to me. There is a practical limit to the number of users who can connect to a FileMaker database, but as for data limits — number of records, number of characters in a single text field of a single record — there are no practical limits, so it’s a little new for me to have to worry about these issues. Keeping me on my toes.

[kuovonne]

WilliamPorterTech:

As for self-destruct, yes, some time ago (15 years?) I had a FileMaker database gag, crash, and become corrupted during a very large ingestion of data.

Ah yes, I have had other non-Airtable databases become corrupted. I have not had that experience with Airtable. At most I have had Airtable bases become temporarily unresponsive.