title: Is it ok to use character values for primary keys?
body: <p>Is there a performance gain or best practice when it comes to using unique, numeric ID fields in a database table compared to using character-based ones?</p>
  
  <p>For instance, if I had two tables: </p>
  
  <h2><strong>athlete</strong></h2>
  
  <p><strong>id</strong> ... <em>17</em>, <strong>name</strong> ... <em>Rickey Henderson</em>, <strong>teamid</strong> ... <em>28</em></p>
  
  <h2><strong>team</strong></h2>
  
  <p><strong>teamid</strong> ... <em>28</em>, <strong>teamname</strong> ... <em>Oakland</em></p>
  
  <p>The athlete table, with thousands of players, would be easier to read if the <strong>teamid</strong> was, say, "OAK" or "SD" instead of "28" or "31". Let's take for granted the <strong>teamid</strong> values would remain unique and consistent in character form.</p>
  
  <p>I know you CAN use characters, but is it a bad idea for indexing, filtering, etc for any reason?</p>
  
  <p><em>Please ignore the normalization argument as these tables are more complicated than the example.</em></p>