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

On 7/21/07, Siah <siasookhteh@gmail.com> 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