VARCHAR255 -- or not

Suggested max len

First, I will mention some common strings that are always hex, or otherwise limited to ASCII. For these, you should specify CHARACTER SET ascii (latin1 is ok) so that it will not waste space:

UUID CHAR(36) CHARACTER SET ascii -- or pack into BINARY(16)
country_code CHAR(2) CHARACTER SET ascii
ip_address CHAR(39) CHARACTER SET ascii -- or pack into BINARY(16)
phone VARCHAR(20) CHARACTER SET ascii -- probably enough to handle extension
postal_code VARCHAR(20) CHARACTER SET ascii -- (not 'zip_code') (don't know the max

city VARCHAR(100) -- This Russian town needs 91:
    Poselok Uchebnogo Khozyaystva Srednego Professionalno-Tekhnicheskoye Uchilishche Nomer Odin
country VARCHAR(50) -- probably enough
name VARCHAR(64) -- probably adequate; more than some government agencies allow

Why not simply 255? There are two reasons to avoid the common practice of using (255) for everything.

• When a complex SELECT needs to create temporary table (for a subquery, UNION, GROUP BY, etc), the preferred choice is to use the MEMORY engine, which puts the data in RAM. But VARCHARs are turned into CHAR in the process. This makes VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 take 1020 bytes. That can lead to needing to spill to disk, which is slower.
• In certain situations, InnoDB will look at the potential size of the columns in a table and decide that it will be too big, aborting a CREATE TABLE.

VARCHAR versus TEXT

Usage hints for *TEXT, CHAR, and VARCHAR, plus some Best Practice:

• Never use TINYTEXT.
• Almost never use CHAR – it is fixed length; each character is the max length of the CHARACTER SET (eg, 4 bytes/character for utf8mb4).
• With CHAR, use CHARACTER SET ascii unless you know otherwise.
• VARCHAR(n) will truncate at n characters; TEXT will truncate at some number of bytes. (But, do you want truncation?)
• *TEXT may slow down complex SELECTs due to how temp tables are handled.