Is the use of VARCHAR(256) as Primary Keys preferred in Oracle?

Hello all,

   First off, the disclaimer to explain my ignorance of the Oracle Server. I am not an Oracle DBA. I am not an Oracle Developer. I am just the poor bastard in the office that knows enough about database design to be asked the database questions. Since I plead complete and utter ignorance to the nuts and bolts of Oracle, I ask this group for its help.

   A vendor we use has provided us with a schema of an Oracle database that their application utilizes. Aside from some basic normalization issues in the database design, I have a question about Oracle's efficiency in regards to using VARCHAR(256) as primary and foreign keys. The tables in question are without any type of surrogate keys.   Would someone please explain (in relative layman's terms, I am a DBA, but not an Oracle DBA) the process Oracle goes through to optimize and utilize these values. The vendor swears up and down that this new design will increase performance. I am skeptical about that(Go figure, a DBA being skeptical about vendor developers' assertions). Do the inner workings of Oracle advocate the VARCHAR(PK) design and in what type of environment has to be in place for this scenario to work as advertised in terms of fragmentation, memory residence and allocation, process priority, etc. I will appreciate all of your responses and thank you in advance for your input. Received on Sat Nov 16 2002 - 14:58:25 CST