[drupal-devel] MySQL ENUM vs. TINYINT (possible performance boost?)

[piotrwww at krukowiecki.net]

On Sat, Oct 15, 2005 at 11:26:15PM +0100, Robert Douglass wrote:
> Angie Byron wrote:
> >However, we do have a lot of TINYINT fields that are only ever going to 
> >store either 0 or 1, which could be changed to ENUM('0','1') NOT NULL as 
> >the analyzer recommends.
> >
> >Any MySQL gurus who could shed some more light on this? Is it worth 
> >doing? Would we gain any performance benefit from this or would it be 
> >too negligible to notice?
>
> And the other, bigger, question is; where does this leave PostgreSQL 
> support?

PostgreSQL of course does not have ENUMs ;)
It does have bool data type that can accept '1' and '0' as values.
Unfortunatelly on SELECTs it returns 't' and 'f' for true and false
falues, so I don't think it can be used as a substitute for ENUM, unless
you use ENUM('t', 'f') for mysql.
There would be other differences, like mysql allowing incorrect values
etc...

I don't believe (without any proofs) that ENUMs would provide any/significant 
speed increase...


-- 
Piotrek
irc: #debian.pl
Mors Drosophilis melanogastribus!