Performance of index on varchar2 vs integer

I haven't tried this with ORACLE, though I tried it with Informix and found essentially no difference.

I've lots of short strings, avg length is probably 4 with min = 1 and max = 18. I could replace these strings with ints and have a lookup table in memory if querying for something like = 1173 would be faster than = 'macaroni'.

Ideas?

Thanks in advance. Received on Thu Jun 03 1999 - 20:22:06 CDT