Changing innodb_page_size in my.cnf file does not restart mysql database

Question

Hope you have a great day. I have a table with 470 columns to be exact. I am working on Django unit testing and the tests won't execute giving the error when I run command python manage.py test:

Row size too large (> 8126). Changing some columns to TEXT or BLOB or using ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC or ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED may help. In current row format, BLOB prefix of 768 bytes is stored inline

To resolve this issue I am trying to increase the innodb_page_size in MySQL my.cnf file. When I restart MySQL server after changing value in my.cnf file, MySQL won't restart.

I have tried almost every available solution on stackoverflow but no success.

MYSQL version=5.5.57 Ubuntu version = 16.04

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

Answer 1

Since I have never seen anyone use the feature of having bigger block size, I have no experience with making it work. And I recommend you not be the first to try.

Instead I offer several likely workarounds.

Don't use VARCHAR(255) blindly; make the lengths realistic for the data involved.

Don't use uf8 (or utf8mb4) for columns that can only have ascii. Examples: postcode, hex strings, UUIDs, country_code, etc. Use CHARACTER SET ascii .

Vertically partition the table. That is spit it into two tables with the same PRIMARY KEY .

Don't splay arrays across columns; use another table and have multiple rows in it. Example: phone1, phone2, phone3.