Hello All

Could someone explain to me please what are the advantages and disadvantages to have varchar field (username in my case) as PRIMARY KEY

Thanks,

Shouldn't make much of a difference from a design standpoint.

At the implementation level, there could be some performance differences. Depends on the RDBMS, different software handles it different ways.

I'm most familiar with DB2. VARCHAR has an extra 2 bytes for length, so if most of your columns are the same length, CHAR saves space. VARCHAR also can lead to some space management issues, since an UPDATE can increase the space a column needs. This can require more processing than an in-place update. There also used to be some issues with DB2 and comparissons, where it wouldn't use your index if the data types didn't exactly match. No longer the case.

But with today's systems unless your database has absolutely critical performance requirements, I doubt you'll see much difference.