Perfomance hint

[Franco Lombardo]

I have a table on wich I perfom an indexed search like

SELECT * FROM MYTABLE WHERE MYFIELD = ?

I'm designing the table and I can decide the type
of column MYFIELD. The two choices are:
1) CHAR(14)
2) DECIMAL(14)
In which case I will reach the best performances?

Thanks a lot.

Bye

Franco

[Anton Versteeg]

I would think: the shorter the field the better.
Dec(14) takes 8 bytes and Char(14) 14 bytes.
Franco Lombardo wrote:

I have a table on wich I perfom an indexed search like

SELECT * FROM MYTABLE WHERE MYFIELD = ?

I'm designing the table and I can decide the type
of column MYFIELD. The two choices are:
1) CHAR(14)
2) DECIMAL(14)
In which case I will reach the best performances?

Thanks a lot.

Bye

Franco

[Mark Yudkin]

I suspect you'll find the performance to be almost identical. You should
choose the value of MYFIELD based on business requirements, not performance
considerations. If it has a decimal value, use DECIMAL. If it can take any
sequence of 14 characters, choose CHAR. If it's a YYYYMMDDHHMMSS timestamp
(that 14 makes me suspicious), use a TIMESTAMP.

"Franco Lombardo" <f_********@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:c5************@ID-100339.news.uni-berlin.de...

I have a table on wich I perfom an indexed search like

SELECT * FROM MYTABLE WHERE MYFIELD = ?

I'm designing the table and I can decide the type
of column MYFIELD. The two choices are:
1) CHAR(14)
2) DECIMAL(14)
In which case I will reach the best performances?

Thanks a lot.

Bye

Franco