Question

I am currently planning to develop a music streaming application. And i am wondering what would be better as a primary key in my tables on the server. An ID int or a Unique String.

Methods 1:

Songs Table:
SongID(int), Title(string), *Artist**(string), Length(int), *Album**(string)

Genre Table
Genre(string), Name(string)

SongGenre:
***SongID****(int), ***Genre****(string)

Method 2

Songs Table:
SongID(int), Title(string), *ArtistID**(int), Length(int), *AlbumID**(int)

Genre Table
GenreID(int), Name(string)

SongGenre:
***SongID****(int), ***GenreID****(int)

Key: Bold = Primary Key, *Field** = Foreign Key

I’m currently designing using method 2 as I believe it will speed up lookup performance and use less space as an int takes a lot less space then a string.

Is there any reason this isn’t a good idea? Is there anything I should be aware of?

Answer 1

You are doing the right thing – identity field should be numeric and not string based, both for space saving and for performance reasons (matching keys on strings is slower than matching on integers).