Hi,

> First, thanks everyone for your time on this.
>
> Ok, so here's what I have settled on for the moment and how I got
> there.
>
> I first split the UNICODE VARCHAR(1024) over 16 VARCHAR(64)
> segments. I then individually indexed each of these 16 columns and
> change my code to replace an ORDER BY "big_ass_field" with an "ORDER
> BY Seg1, Seg2, Seg3, etc".
>
> This, as is probably not surprising, did not give me that much of an
> improvement. I have to imagine that the buffer pages where pretty
> damn huge.
>
> Then, I noticed that most of my uses of this field are generally
> less than 80 characters. So I go rid of the 16 VARCHAR(64) segment
> and replaced it with a single VARCHAR(84) segment that just took the
> first 84 chars of the VARCHAR(1024) field. I then refactored the
> ORDER BY clause to be "ORDER BY seg1, big_ass_field".
>
> This turned out to be much faster than making a distinct segment
> column for the entire string.
>
> For now the performance is acceptable. If I go to the FLOAT order
> field at some point in the future, I will report my approach and
> results.
>
> Thanks again everyone for your help.

You can play also with these entries in the configuration file :

SortMemBlockSize = 1048576
SortMemUpperLimit = 67108864

Regards,
Arno Brinkman
ABVisie

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