On 5/3/07, Matthew Hixson <hixson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is there a significant performance difference between using int primary keys and string primary keys in Postgres?
PostgreSQL uses B-trees for its indexes, insertion time is logarithmic regardless of the type of the key, but strings have a larger overhead since they involve character comparisons; (i - j) is a lot faster than strcmp(i, j). If you do go for strings, I would suggest that the beginning of the key be statistically distributed as widely as possible; ie., avoid common prefixes. Alexander.
