MySQL and Binary(16) – The Reasons/Benefits/Drawbacks (#mysql)
I recently posted an article about using BINARY(16) for storing MD5’s as unique identifiers instead of simple integer ID’s (usually auto increment); in that article I touched on one of the benefits, reducing JOIN’s, but there are other reasons for doing it too, so I thought I’d post an article discussing purely the reasons behind using BINARY(16). As I discussed in my previous article, an MD5 string is actually a hexadecimal number capable of storing values as large as 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. MySQL doesn’t have any efficient integer field for storing numbers this big so you have two choices for storage, a … Continue reading