field sizes

23style

this developer at my work is all caught up in making things more efficient..which is good..but sometimes it's too much

does making smaller field sizes really make that much of a difference in speed / processing?

my only problem with it is sometimes it gets a little too cryptic...we have fields like rid and pid (reseller_id and place_id).

the other day he changed zip_postal to just zip.

does this make that much of a difference?

is trading off readability good measure for what seems to me like it would only be a very small increase in performance?

just curious

thanks 😃

csousley

If those are just the field names I would say he's gone crazy... But that's just me.

Database size is important, but that's directed more to the size of the data itself, not the name of the field. Like using a bunch of text fields when your storing something that would fit in a char(5) is going to make a difference, but I don't think the field name would.

Now I've never researched this, but it sounds silly to me!

23style

true, thats what i figured as well.
size of data is far more important than size of field names.

Pig

I will confirm that his approach is stupid. You are more inefficient if you don't know WTF you are looking at. Best efficiency comes from having a method and being consistent with it.