string or Guid?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jeffry van de Vuurst
  • Start date Start date
J

Jeffry van de Vuurst

Hi,

I'm working with Guids as the primary key of some of my tables. In my code,
I'm working with those Guids. Now I was wondering what is the best way to
work with Guids (in terms of performance, memory usage, etc)? Should I use
the datatype Guid or should I convert them to strings and then just work
with the string representation?

The majority of the processing I do with these Guids is comparing a Guid
with another Guid. Right now, I use the Guid datatype and I pass Guids as
parameters to functions, but maybe it's better to use strings.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jeffry
 
Well, as far as perf, a GUID is a 16-byte structure. If you represent it as
a string, then it'll use more memory (each byte will become 2 characters,
and each character is 2 bytes) -- 4 times more.

-mike
MVP
 
You probably want to stick to the GUID class for the previous reason stated,
and also, you will probably be working with the SQL uniqueidentifier
data-type. A GUID->uniqueidentifier is a pretty simple cast, opposed to
casting a string back to a GUID, then casting again to a uniqueidentifier.
 
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