Absolutely, there is a significant speed benefit from using appropriate date/timestamp will speed up your lookups. They are stored not as ints per-se but are binary encoded in a similar manner. Read this carefully before before you undertake any conversions.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/date-and-time-types.html You may also save considerable space.. from http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/storage-requirements.html DATE 3 bytes TIME 3 bytes DATETIME 8 bytes TIMESTAMP 4 bytes YEAR 1 byte - michael dykman On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 12:31 AM, mos <mo...@fastmail.fm> wrote: > Are date columns stored as String or Integer in a MyISAM table? > > I am trying to squeeze more speed from my application and a date column is > used in most of the indexes for my tables. I'm wondering if changing the > Date data type to an Integer is going to speed the queries up. I'm using > Delphi and internally it represents dates as float so using integers will > speed up the Delphi code. But the main slow down I have is with executing > the queries. The dates are used in the indexes, sorting, and in a few table > joins. So is there a speed advantage of switching the dates to integer? > > TIA > > Mike > > > -- > MySQL General Mailing List > For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql > To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql?unsub=mdyk...@gmail.com > > -- - michael dykman - mdyk...@gmail.com - All models are wrong. Some models are useful. -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql?unsub=arch...@jab.org
