Which is better?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lee
  • Start date Start date
L

Lee

Hello everyone,
Can you advise me on a performance issue. I've got a
field in a table that is currently set as a text field
with a maximum of 5 characters. My instinct tells me it
would be more efficient to change it to a number field
(the field only ever contains numbers between the range
10001 and 90001). Am I right to do this?
The database has large amounts of data in it and any
performance benefit would be worth having.

Regards,

Lee
 
It would save 1 byte per record.
A Long takes up 4 bytes whereas a string takes 1 byte per
characters
 
Hello everyone,
Can you advise me on a performance issue. I've got a
field in a table that is currently set as a text field
with a maximum of 5 characters. My instinct tells me it
would be more efficient to change it to a number field
(the field only ever contains numbers between the range
10001 and 90001). Am I right to do this?
The database has large amounts of data in it and any
performance benefit would be worth having.
Click to expand...

I'd leave it as text, frankly. The one-byte difference in fieldsize
will be very minor. I suppose you could try creating a 10,000,000 row
table (which is what I'd call "large amounts", not sure of your
definition) with (obviously repeating) random values in Text and
Number/Long Integer fields, and time searching for a single value
and/or sorting the table by the field; but my guess is that the
difference will be minor.
 
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