GUID: varchar(36) versus uniqueidentifier

Question

I\'m working with a legacy database that stores GUID values as a varchar(36) data type:

CREATE TABLE T_Rows (
    RowID    VARCHAR(36) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
            


        

Answer 1

If your database is Oracle then the performance of indexes for raw data in older version of Oracle (9) was much, much poorer than indexing a varchar(36) field. Luckily this has changed in Oracle 10 and 11.