Re:Obfuscate Your Company
by jeffiel on Friday May 29, 2009 @06:59PM
(#633010)
dpifke, you're right that it's definitely slower and more space consuming to index and query 32 character strings vs. ints. However, it's probably inconsequential for most applications, especially if your queries are simple SELECTs and INSERTS, as most web apps are doing.
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Pedantic: MD5 doesn't produce a 32-character string, it produces a 128 bit number. With full precision, you can represent it in 25 bytes base32. But since you don't need security, just uniformity and unpredictability, you can truncate that to whatever size you're comfortable with.