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Issue created by Andreas Brandl@abrandl🌴Contributor

Enforce limit on text columns

Coming from https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/64505, we want to enforce a limit on the length of text data. For string types, this can be done with varchar(N). For the Postgres text type, this can be done with a table CHECK constraint.

The benefit to using text with a CHECK constraint is, that it's straight-forward to change the limit later - without rewriting the whole table. With varchar(N), changing N leads to a rewrite of the table which may be unacceptable.

The proposal here is to:

  • Implement CHECK constraints for limiting the size of text columns
  • Enforce placing a limit on text columns with rubocop
  • Disallow using varchar(N), i.e. string columns in favor of using text always.

From a Postgres perspective, there's only little difference between varchar and text (except the possibility to limit the size of a varchar). Both are varlena types internally and use the same code. There's a good background read comparing textual datatypes.