string or Guid?

[Jeffry van de Vuurst]

Hi,

I'm working with Guids as the primary key of some of my tables. In my code,
I'm working with those Guids. Now I was wondering what is the best way to
work with Guids (in terms of performance, memory usage, etc)? Should I use
the datatype Guid or should I convert them to strings and then just work
with the string representation?

The majority of the processing I do with these Guids is comparing a Guid
with another Guid. Right now, I use the Guid datatype and I pass Guids as
parameters to functions, but maybe it's better to use strings.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jeffry

 

[Michael Giagnocavo [MVP]]

Well, as far as perf, a GUID is a 16-byte structure. If you represent it as
a string, then it'll use more memory (each byte will become 2 characters,
and each character is 2 bytes) -- 4 times more.

-mike
MVP

 

[Jeffry van de Vuurst]

Ok, thanks for the info. I guess I'll stick with Guids.

Jeffry

 

[Steven]

You probably want to stick to the GUID class for the previous reason stated,
and also, you will probably be working with the SQL uniqueidentifier
data-type. A GUID->uniqueidentifier is a pretty simple cast, opposed to
casting a string back to a GUID, then casting again to a uniqueidentifier.