> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Storage Box [mailto:spam@...]
> Gesendet: Samstag, 11. Dezember 2004 19:46
> An: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
> Betreff: RE: [firebird-support] binary or string?
>
> My main concern is how efficiently they're stored in the DB.
> If joining two 64-bit integers together in a query is faster
> than two char(16) octets, than I'll take your advice. I
> would imagine it would be much faster as numeric comparisons
> are generally faster than character-based comparisons (in
> probably most modern databases).

CHAR(16) (16 hexadecimal coded chars) is not for discussion, as it will be *much* slower. Your only available options are INT64 or CHAR(8) BINARY. Anyway, INT64 is faster when comparing, which is needed in table joins.

Simply use INT64, and don't fiddle arround with CHAR. There is simply one big problem with using CHAR (xy) with binary data: Most database administration tools are not aware of the fact that you are misusing string fields for binary data. In my case, I'm not able to write a simple query like this:

SELECT * FROM Table1 WHERE Uuid = '...';

Simply because '...' could contain null-chars and control-chars and other stuff. It is easier to write this:

SELECT * FROM Table1 WHERE Int64PKEY = 26589734353;

In my case CHAR(xy) BINARY was the only option, in your case, you could use both, but you *should* use Int64 data type.

Regards, Alex