Re: indexing on CHAR vs. DECIMAL

Posted in 2003

ART KAGEL, BLOOMBERG/ 65E 55TH — Thu, 19 Jun 2003 22:08:12 — source: IIUG Forums & Mailing Lists

Informix's DECIMAL type is stored as a a string of bytes with 2 binary base 100 digits per byte, this is very efficient for storage, calculation, and indexing. User DECIMAL rather than char. Art S. Kagel ----- Original Message ----- From: Micha <michaNOSPAM@pop.ecrc.de> At: 6/19 17:44 > 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