Re: Surrogate numeric keys versus natural character keys.

Hi Sybrand,
sorry about posting in HTML, it's been a long time since I used UseNet and I had no idea that Navigator would post in HTML.

In my example I am specifically interested in cases where the cust_num is NOT only numeric, I should have made that clearer in my example.So, let's day the cust_num is not only alphanumeric, but is also always 30 characters long, and the table needs to be able to hold 10mil rows (so a 16-bit number would do the trick), surely there is then a performance benefit switching to a numeric key? A join comparison on a 16-bit number is sure to be faster than a comparison on a 30-character string, or am I missing something here?

> IMO the comparison semantics in numbers are far more efficient than
the comparison semantics for strings.

The "comparison semantics"? What do you mean by this?

How do I find out what system Oracle is using for it's character set? And how do I find out the size per character? Is there a web page that covers this sort of thing?

Thanks for all the help,
Alan. Received on Thu Aug 10 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT