MySQL performance of unique varchar field vs unique bigint

Question

I'm working on an application that will be implementing a hex value as a business key (in addition to an auto increment field as primary key) similar to the URL id seen in Gmail. I will be adding a unique constraint to the column and was originally thinking of storing the value as a bigint to get away from searching a varchar field but was wondering if that's necessary if the field is unique.

Internal joins would be done using the auto increment field and the hex value would be used in the where clause for filtering.

What sort of performance hit would there be in simply storing the value as a varchar(x), or perhaps a char(x) over the additional work in doing the conversion to and from hex to store the value as an integer in the database? Is it worth the additional complexity?

I did a quick test on a small number of rows (50k) and had similar search result times. If there is a large performance issue would it be linear, or exponential?

I'm using InnoDB as the engine.

Answer 1

Is your hex value a GUID? Although I used to worry about the performance of such long items as indexes, I have found that on modern databases the performance difference on even millions of records is fairly insignificant.

A potentially larger problem is the memory that the index consumes (16 byte vs 4 byte int, for example), but on servers that I control I can allocate for that. As long as the index can be in memory, I find that there is more overhead from other operations that the size of the index element doesn't make a noticeable difference.

On the upside, if you use a GUID you gain server independence for records created and more flexibility in merging data on multiple servers (which is something I care about, as our system aggregates data from child systems).

There is a graph on this article that seems to back up my suspicion: Myths, GUID vs Autoincrement