At 12/01/2002 08:21 AM (Sunday), you wrote:

>Fetching 500 rows with 4 bytes of payload is not very nice idea.

I'm not sure why you say this. Pure esthetics?

Seems to me if you are interested in efficiency of fetching results set it
would not be worth the trouble. Reducing TCP packet transmissions would be
the way to highest efficiency, IMO. Some quick estimation: Say you use TCP
packets on the large side, such as 1400 bytes per transmission. Your 500
resulting records would be returned about 120 per packet (12 bytes taken
per PK) using about 5 transmissions. In comparison, using a blob field
filled and returned as one record would take about 7 bytes per resulting PK
value. That works out to abut 70 PKs per packet (7 bytes taken per PK), or
7 transmissions.

Hardly worth the effort to reduce from 7 transmissions to 5, is it?