On Jul 21, 2007, at 5:49 AM, Siah wrote:
Designing my application, I was wondering if having my primary keys (to be indexed) with VARCHAR brings performance down significantly? My own test didn't show much difference. Thinking about it though, I'd guess Integer Indexing should be much quicker and efficient.
Generally, anything dealing with a text/varchar field is going to be slower than on, say, an integer. But remember the first rule of performance tuning: don't. Do you *really* need to worry about the extra overhead of varchar vs int? Probably not.
What you *should* be thinking about is do you really want a varchar PK? Generally speaking, it's better to use a phantom PK (ie: a SERIAL), and put a UNIQUE constraint on the varchar in the appropriate table.
-- Jim Nasby jim@xxxxxxxxx EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)
