Grzegorz Jaœkiewicz<gryzman(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> joining on varchars is always going to be very expensive. Longer
> the value is, more expensive it will be. Consider going for
> surrogate keys.
Surrogate keys come with their own set of costs and introduce quite
a few problems of their own. I don't want to start a flame war or
go into an overly long diatribe on the evils of surrogate keys on
this thread; suffice it to say that it's not the first thing to try
here.
As an example of the performance we get using natural keys, with
compound keys on almost every table, check out this 1.3TB database,
being updated live by 3000 users as you view it:
http://wcca.wicourts.gov/
Some tables have hundreds of millions of rows. No partitioning.
-Kevin