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
string, but I am concerned that this may have a significant impact on
performance of complicated queries.
Thanks in advance.
Steve Chell
