Unique IDs and perfomance

Hi,

We are about to change our system from depending on ino:id to an attribute id instead eg.


client name
client title
etc.


Unique IDs were discussed in this thread:
Former discussion about IDs
where several solutions were proposed.
Our plan is to make our own UID generator to supply a UID wrapper class.

My question is about what type this id should be to obtain the best performance?
My first choice would be int or long instead of text.

Regards

HC Hammerstoft