>
> That would certainly make the problem worse. How many records are
> you retrieving? How long are the keys? Are you sure that the sort
> is the problem?
>

Yes, I'm sure about the problem. The VARCHAR is 1024 in length. It
has qualified names much like a file system, but they cannot be
chopped up and stored hierarchically. The same query without the
sort takes a few milliseconds, with the ORDER BY on this field the
query takes about 2 minutes.