Insert performance

[Bart Ronsyn]

Hi,

My project needs a very high number of inserts per second. I did some benchmarking and it seems that the numbers of inserts per second varies
heavily on the type of the primary key column.

I inserted a million records into my myisam table and repeated this three times
for different column types of the primary key. This were my results :

- DECIMAL : 12500 inserts per second
- INT : 9500 inserts per second
- VARCHAR(40) and CHAR(40) : 1000 inserts per second

It seems that using a varchar column as primary key makes the inserts 10 times
slower compared to numeric column types.. Is there a way to obtain the same speed using a varchar column as primary key ?

I'm running Mysql 5.0.30 on Debian Linux and all varchar columns are using utf8 as charset.

Thanks for your answers;
Bart