Hello all, hope you can help me with your experience or some links here, as I don't have any experience on this.

I'd like to know about differences in performance between numeric IDs and short string IDs.

My problem is: I'm builing a mid-sized site (about 1000 pages), and I don't want to go with the ugly and unuseful ?pageid=548 querystrings.

So I though of an approach like I've seen you doing with mod_rewrite.

My querystring now is like: www.site.com/?section/subsection/article

I'm on apache + chilisoft asp + mysql. The "rewrite" is simply the querystring going into an sql query.

I could think of two approaches for this:

1. NUMERIC IDs: these are the standard. I (think) get a faster search for an article once I have an ID, but to get an ID from that querystring I'd have to do a string lookup and some join anyway.

2. STRING IDs: these fit straightforward into the url-as-querystring scheme, and can easily be checked for duplication before inserting a new article. But I fear, as it's not the "textbook" aproach and there might be a reason (performance?) for this.

Also, a mixed approach could work
(like ?secion/subsection/548)

Let me know what you think, thanks for your help

- Manuel Razzari