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Re: Are varchar primary keys less efficient than autonumbers?
Posted by: Exception e
Date: May 14, 2009 07:42AM

Composite primary keys are at least better than some varchar. So you could safely drop the varchar option.

Whether composite key is better than an artifial auto-increment key is not clear to me. There is some controversy about this, e.g. http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-128299.html You could find more debate about this.

Performance shouldn't be an issue. Using auto-increment is convenient, but some experts say that is unclean to do so. The extra required storage shouldn't be an issue in these days.

It would be nice if some of the hard core database designers from MySQL could give their opinion!

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Re: Are varchar primary keys less efficient than autonumbers?
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