indexing on CHAR vs. DECIMAL

Posted in 2003

Micha — Thu, 19 Jun 2003 22:32:05 +0200 — source: Usenet: comp.databases.informix

I have a column of long integers that can be either defined as DECIMAL(17) or CHAR. Using DECIMAL takes less space, but what about the indexing efficiency, is it roughly equal for both or is CHAR better? The numbers are not consecutive but rather clustered. --Micha