On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 04:30:20PM -0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > One way to speed things up is to convert the entire checksum. Consider > what a md5 checksum really is: a text string representing a hexadecimal > number. Storing it as TEXT or CHAR is not as good as storing it as a > number directly. Have your application convert it to a decimal number, > and then store the checksum as type NUMERIC in the database.
A subsequent idea is that with NUMERIC or other variable length fields you are wasting time, space and cache hits anyway. It would be probably faster to create a custom datatype, with fixed length for the exact size of an MD5 sum. With suitable input and output functions and all the operators you need, you will likely gain some additional performance boost. IIRC, Manfred Koizar developed a fixed-width char datatype for Shridar Daitankhar (sp?) maybe a year ago. It is probably a good starting point. Look for it in the pgsql-performance archives. -- Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>) "Endurecerse, pero jamás perder la ternura" (E. Guevara) ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster