At 12:23 AM 27/10/2004 +0000, you wrote:

> >
> > 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.

Why is that so?

>The same query without the
>sort takes a few milliseconds, with the ORDER BY on this field the
>query takes about 2 minutes.

Unsurprising...

./heLen