In a clustered index, BLOB, VARCHAR and TEXT columns that are not part of the primary key may be stored on separately allocated (“overflow”) pages. We call these “off-page columns” whose values are stored on singly-linked lists of overflow pages.

For tables created in ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC or ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED, the values of BLOB, TEXT or VARCHAR columns may be stored fully off-page, depending on their length and the length of the entire row. For columns that are stored off-page, the clustered index record only contains 20-byte pointers to the overflow pages, one per column. Whether any columns are stored off-page depends on the page size and the total size of the row. When the row is too long to fit entirely within the page of the clustered index, InnoDB chooses the longest columns for off-page storage until the row fits on the clustered index page. As noted above, if a row does not fit by itself on a compressed page, an error occurs.

Tables created in previous versions of InnoDB use the “Antelope” file format, which supports only ROW_FORMAT=REDUNDANT and ROW_FORMAT=COMPACT. In these formats, InnoDB stores the first 768 bytes of BLOB, VARCHAR and TEXT columns in the clustered index record along with the primary key. The 768-byte prefix is followed by a 20-byte pointer to the overflow pages that contain the rest of the column value.

When a table is in COMPRESSED format, all data written to overflow pages is compressed “as is”; that is, InnoDB applies the zlib compression algorithm to the entire data item. Other than the data, compressed overflow pages contain an uncompressed header and trailer comprising a page checksum and a link to the next overflow page, among other things. Therefore, very significant storage savings can be obtained for longer BLOB, TEXT or VARCHAR columns if the data is highly compressible, as is often the case with text data (but not previously compressed images).

The overflow pages are of the same size as other pages. A row containing ten columns stored off-page occupies ten overflow pages, even if the total length of the columns is only 8K bytes. In an uncompressed table, ten uncompressed overflow pages occupy 160K bytes. In a compressed table with an 8K page size, they occupy only 80K bytes. Thus, it is often more efficient to use compressed table format for tables with long column values.

Using a 16K compressed page size can reduce storage and I/O costs for BLOB, VARCHAR or TEXT columns, because such data often compress well, and might therefore require fewer “overflow” pages, even though the B-tree nodes themselves take as many pages as in the uncompressed form.