JOINS and Integers vs. Indexed "Strings".

I was told that, when possible, use integer fields for the equality comparison in INNER JOINS. Today someone suggested that using character fields that are indexed should be just as efficient.What do you think?

TIA,

barkingdog

It is the size of the index key which is most important. The larger your index key is, the more pages should be processed (and probably read from the hard disk: this is the slowest operation) while executing query. And, of course, there are some overhead comparing to strings in terms of collation. So, integer field is more effective in most cases.