On Mon, April 28, 2008 09:44, Rob Wultsch wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 6:49 AM, Rob Wultsch <wultsch@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am going to assume that you are asking this question because
>> performance has not improved from this change. Is this correct?
>>
>> I don't think that your surogate key (id) is useful, but that is
>> probably minor. I think that your hostings company suggestion is
>> probably a good idea, but will also probably not impact performance. A
>> prymary key is basically only a unique not null key, and it sounds
>> like your isbn field should have those properties.
>>
>> >key_len=302
>> This is pretty horrible. If I needed better performance I would try to
>> turn the isbn field into a bigint (the dashes are the only non-numeric
>> characters and have no significance, right?). That would start with
>> something like:
>> ALTER TABLE `books` ADD `new_isbn` BIGINT NOT NULL ;
>> UPDATE `books` SET `new_isbn` = replace(`isbn`,'-','');
>> ...
>> though that may require significant changes in your app (converting
>> the string into an int) but a stored procedure might make this
>> somewhat less painful.
>>
>> What are your goals here?
>
> For the record: if performance is good enough I wouldn't change
> anything...
>
> --
> Rob Wultsch
> wultsch@gmail.com
> wultsch (aim)
>
ISBN field is way too long, I think they just changed it to 13 characters.
Depending on your application leading '0' may be important so you may be
stuck with a character field. As was suggested, loose the '-' and spaces.
I don't think they are standard and I would think its easier to
universally remove them.
------
William R. Mussatto
Systems Engineer
http://www.csz.com
909-920-9154