Re: Primary Key Performance with INTEGER vs. VARCHAR

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(at)nasby(dot)net
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)