I have around 900M records with 17 or so string fields. Most of those fields contain 1 of several values. For example, there is a gender field. It contains “M”, “F”, “U”. My question is, if I replace these values with integer values, would that help with performance when querying?
Some of my other fields are longer, up to 20+ characters. Another field contains a range of income, for example “$50,000 - $75,000”. We have 13 different income ranges. Many of our queries are along the lines of, “give me everyone who has an income between $50,000 to $125,000”. What I’m doing now is performing and $in query where I pass in each income range that fits, for example: ‘$50,001 - $ 75,000’, ‘$75,001 - $ 100,000’, ‘$100,001 - $ 125,000’.
Again, if I replace these string values with integers, would that help performance?