Re: MAC address as primary key - BIGINT or CHAR(12)

[Pete Wilson]

I agree, and didn't mean to say that I disagreed. This is certainly one of the top five
principles to follow, imo. Too many times, while trouble-shooting, I've run up on the
rock of a binary (meaning: indecipherable) field.

What is the cost of including the binary representation (for indexing) and also the
readable representation (just for debugging/problem-solving)? (Well, of course I know
what the cost is: it's 12 bytes, plus overhead, per row.)

It all depends, but in general, would you call that too costly, given the benefit?

-- Pete Wilson    
   http://www.pwilson.net/


--- On Thu, 5/14/09, Jim Lyons <jlyons4435@stripped> wrote:

> From: Jim Lyons <jlyons4435@stripped>

> As I said in my post, this is a
> general principle for me.  Nominal data should have a data
> type of some sort of character.  You will never run into
> unexpected  problems  down the line.