On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Grant Johnson <grant@amadensor.com> wrote:
> My experience has been that the performance advantage for numeric keys is
> primarily an Oracle thing. However, Oracle is popular enough for people to
> assume that it applies to databases in general.
The advantage in PG also exists, only tied to size. It's not really
whether it's numeric or not, but whether values are big or not. Int or
other primitive types tend to be far faster to join because of their
fixed, small size. If you have a varchar, and if you have big values
from time to time, joining becomes heavy because the index is huge (it
has to contain the values).
