I'd like to know about any potential issues of choosing a char(32) as the column type of a primary key instead of BIGINT or some other numeric type. A little background.
I would like to generate a unique identifier to use as a primary key for our application instead of using an AUTOINCREMENT column. This is to give us database independence. I've seen several algorithms that will generate a GUID based on timestamp, machine IP, etc and return a 32 byte string that is guaranteed unique. However, there are concerns that joins using this key versus a large integer would cause performance problems as the table grows. Would joins of tables with character based primary keys be slower than those with numeric based keys? Has anyone had experience implementing a character-based primary key in a table of non-trivial size (> 500,000 rows)? Thanks for any assistance or pointers. Aaron [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
