Dimitry Sibiryakov wrote:

> Out of curiosity: what to hell are you doing with this result set?
> You definitely can't either print it on paper or show to user.
> The only thing that you can do in this situation - put temp space
> which FB uses for sorting onto separate HDD or even better onto SSD.

Yeah, it's kind of a messed up situation. It does get presented to the
user and it's not too bad just moving forward through the data with the
database cursor. But lets just say they don't really *need* the full
result set... BUT it looks good if it works so I'm trying to do what I can.

A lot of the time the user doesn't get that large of a result set.
Usually they're looking for something specific and the data_set name
will get filtered so there are only a few thousand rows in the result.
Those queries are no problem and work fine.

I know it's theoretically possible to make the full query at least near
as fast as the unsorted query if there was just some way I could index
that foreign varchar field as if it were a column in the main table.
I'm just afraid that Firebird might not be able to do it.