VARCHAR2 PRIMARY KEYS

From: Stephen Chell <slcnz1_at_yahoo.co.nz>
Date: 22 Jun 2001 16:25:50 -0700
Message-ID: <de67291b.0106221525.29f7ae8e@posting.google.com>

I need to find out how the performance of varchar2 primary keys compares with numeric primary keys when joining multiple tables together in a complex query.

Is there a significant degredation in performance?

If anyone can speak from first hand experience, or even better, point me in the direction of an authoritative article, it would be much appreciated.

Background: We are in the design stage of a large web application. One of the decisions that will soon be made is whether or not to generate primary keys in the middle tier (thereby by eliminating a trip to the database to fetch the next value from a sequence). If this approach is taken the generated primary key will probably be a 36 byte string, but I am concerned that this may have a significant impact on performance of complicated queries.

Thanks in advance.

Steve Chell Received on Fri Jun 22 2001 - 18:25:50 CDT