Why using username instead of user id?

[Alan DeKok]

Morteza Milani wrote:
> The only extra step required is to lookup user id from another table. Then
> we can use it instead of username in all queries. To achieve this, we can
> set User-Name to that id. Maybe I'm missing something.

  Not much.  It requires changes to the system, but it's possible.

> I really want that "live" and "historical" tables implemented. I have 35000
> users and I need fetching data from radacct for statistical analysis. It's a
> heavy table!

  Huh?  35K users is a small to medium sized system.  I've seen systems
with 500K to 1M users, all on one MySQL DB!  The system has a lot of RAM
and a few CPUs, but it's not really complicated.

  If doing queries on 35K users is hard, you need either to add indexes,
or to add more RAM to the system.

  Changing the schema to use Id's rather than User-Names will make at
best a few percentage difference.  Adding RAM can make 10x difference.

  Alan DeKok.