#1071 - Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes

As @Devart says, the total length of your index is too long.

The short answer is that you shouldn't be indexing such long VARCHAR columns anyway, because the index will be very bulky and inefficient.

The best practice is to use prefix indexes so you're only indexing a left substring of the data. Most of your data will be a lot shorter than 255 characters anyway.

You can declare a prefix length per column as you define the index. For example:

...
KEY `index` (`parent_menu_id`,`menu_link`(50),`plugin`(50),`alias`(50))
...

But what's the best prefix length for a given column? Here's a method to find out:

SELECT
 ROUND(SUM(LENGTH(`menu_link`)<10)*100/COUNT(`menu_link`),2) AS pct_length_10,
 ROUND(SUM(LENGTH(`menu_link`)<20)*100/COUNT(`menu_link`),2) AS pct_length_20,
 ROUND(SUM(LENGTH(`menu_link`)<50)*100/COUNT(`menu_link`),2) AS pct_length_50,
 ROUND(SUM(LENGTH(`menu_link`)<100)*100/COUNT(`menu_link`),2) AS pct_length_100
FROM `pds_core_menu_items`;

It tells you the proportion of rows that have no more than a given string length in the menu_link column. You might see output like this:

+---------------+---------------+---------------+----------------+
| pct_length_10 | pct_length_20 | pct_length_50 | pct_length_100 |
+---------------+---------------+---------------+----------------+
|         21.78 |         80.20 |        100.00 |         100.00 |
+---------------+---------------+---------------+----------------+

This tells you that 80% of your strings are less than 20 characters, and all of your strings are less than 50 characters. So there's no need to index more than a prefix length of 50, and certainly no need to index the full length of 255 characters.

PS: The INT(1) and INT(32) data types indicates another misunderstanding about MySQL. The numeric argument has no effect related to storage or the range of values allowed for the column. INT is always 4 bytes, and it always allows values from -2147483648 to 2147483647. The numeric argument is about padding values during display, which has no effect unless you use the ZEROFILL option.

I had this issue, and solved by following:

Cause

There is a known bug with MySQL related to MyISAM, the UTF8 character set and indexes that you can check here.

Resolution

• Make sure MySQL is configured with the InnoDB storage engine.

• Change the storage engine used by default so that new tables will always be created appropriately:

  set GLOBAL storage_engine='InnoDb';

• For MySQL 5.6 and later, use the following:

  SET GLOBAL default_storage_engine = 'InnoDB';

• And finally make sure that you're following the instructions provided in Migrating to MySQL.

Reference

This error means that length of index index is more then 1000 bytes. MySQL and storage engines may have this restriction. I have got similar error on MySQL 5.5 - 'Specified key was too long; max key length is 3072 bytes' when ran this script:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS test_table1 (
  column1 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  column2 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  column3 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  column4 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  column5 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  column6 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  KEY `index` (column1, column2, column3, column4, column5, column6)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

UTF8 is multi-bytes, and key length is calculated in this way - 500 * 3 * 6 = 9000 bytes.

But note, next query works!

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS test_table1 (
  column1 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  column2 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  column3 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  column4 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  column5 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  column6 varchar(500) NOT NULL,
  KEY `index` (column1, column2, column3, column4, column5, column6)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

...because I used CHARSET=latin1, in this case key length is 500 * 6 = 3000 bytes.