MySQL Performance Example Was: Seriously, WTF?

[Iain Barnett]

On 11 May 2008, at 5:08 am, muppet wrote:

>
> On May 10, 2008, at 4:08 PM, David Cantrell wrote:
>
>> On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 03:05:03PM +0100, Iain Barnett wrote:
>
>>> 2. Because (I believe) it's faster than a lookup table
>>
>> It's faster *for a person*.
>
> I cannot express how emphatically i agree with this point, even  
> though what i primarily do is not databases.  Nobody likes looking  
> at numbers in trace output or data dumps when they could be seeing  
> the names to which those numbers refer, instead.  Even if you can  
> do the translation in your head, it saps mental bandwidth, and  
> prevents you seeing important patterns you might otherwise have  
> discovered by accident.
>
> Do you read like to your ascii text files as hexadecimal numeric  
> values?  Didn't think so.  :-)
>


Have you all gone a bit doolally? You don't look at the numbers, you  
use a join and look at the text. You could still use the numbers with  
an enum, but you wouldn't, so why would you with a lookup table?


Iain