I'm importing data to a future database that will have one, static MyISAM table (will only be read from). I chose MyISAM because as far as I understand it's faster for my requirements (I'm not very experienced with MySQL / SQL at all).

That table will have various columns such as ID, Name, Gender, Phone, Status... and Country, City, Street columns. Now the question is, should I create tables (e.g Country: Country_ID, Country_Name) for the last 3 columns and refer to them in the main table by ID (normalize...[?]), or just store them as VARCHAR in the main table (having duplicates, obviously)?

My primary concern is speed - since the table won't be written into, data integrity is not a priority. The only actions will be selecting a specific row or searching for rows that much a certain criteria.

Would searching by the Country, City and/or Street columns (and possibly other columns in the same search) be faster if I simply use VARCHAR?