Question

Calculations involving numbers are faster than those involving string.

(a) True

(b) False

I had been asked this question during a job interview.

I need to ask this question from Choosing Data Types for Efficient Queries in section Query Optimization of MySQL

Answer 1

The correct option is (a) True

To explain I would say: Numbers can be compared in a single operation while string comparisons involve several byte by byte or character by character comparisons. As the strings become longer, the performance gets poor.