Home/ Questions/Q 6386745
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-25T03:03:52+00:00

I use id’s for almost all my tables, you never know when they come

  • 0

I use id’s for almost all my tables, you never know when they come handy. But today I read this…

Be extra careful to make sure that, according to convention, your ‘id’ column (or primary key) is:

char(36) and never varchar(36)

CakePHP will work with both definitions, however you will be sacrificing about 50% of the performance of your DB (MySQL in particular). This will be most evident in more complicated SELECT’s, which might require some JOIN’s or calculations.

I wonder… why even use something text-based, when you only have to save integers? I care a great deal about using the right formats for the right content, so I wonder if char gives any performance improvements over integers?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would strongly suggestest using ints. I am doing some modelling for my thesis and I work on large datasets. I had to create a table with about ~70.000.000 rows. My primary key was varchar + int. At the beginning one cycle of creating 5-digit number of rows took 5 minutes, soon it became 40. Dropping the primary key fixed my performance issue. I guess that it is because ensuring uniqueness and it was becoming more and more time consuming. I had no similar issues when my primary key was int.
    it is personal experience though, so maybe someone can give more theoretic and reliable answer.

    • 0