I have a table with 6 columns, and about 2 million rows.

I've had one of these columns set to VARCHAR(50) for a few years now. When I run PROCEDURE ANALYSE(), though, it recommends that I switch it to TINYTEXT.

Is there a reason why TINYTEXT would be faster? Doesn't TINYTEXT set aside 255 characters by default; and if so, wouldn't that take up more room, causing a marginally slower search?