It depends how it's going to be used. If you are going to reference
this table in other tables a lot and/or rarely care about what the
name actually is, then the two-column approach is going to be more
efficient. Numbers are smaller and easier to compare than strings.
On Nov 24, 2006, at 6:54 AM, Tom Allison wrote:
I notice a lot of places where people use the approach of creating
an index and a unique key like:
CREATE TABLE foo (
idx SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
name varchar(32) UNIQUE NOT NULL
)
instead of
CREATE TABLE foo (
name varchar(32) PRIMARY KEY
)
If the name is NEVER going to change, is there any advantage to
doing this?
If there are many-to-many reference tables (like name-to-friends)
is this any different?
I've seen this a lot, but I've always assumed that with the
condition that 'name' would NEVER change, there was no advantage.
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