On 7/21/07, Siah <siasookhteh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi, 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.
Integer indexes are usually quicker to build and smaller which translates to speed (better utilization of o/s cache). The difference between a index lookup in cache/not in cache is much bigger than index lookup integer/text. OTOH, text natural keys save you an index you often have to make anyways and can optimize out joins in some cases. so the answer is, 'it depends' :-) merlin
