Thanks again for all the good suggestions last week. I am now using a multi-column index and results of a table self-join are instantaneous! Even a 5-way join takes only 1-2 seconds. I'm very pleased.
But it takes 30 minutes to build the index on a dual-core Windows machine with 4GB memory. Any ideas on how to improve this? It will have to be done as part of a software installation, and I can't see users waiting that long. Here are the details: CREATE TABLE keyword (key, contyp int, imagecount int, searchcat int, value, nextword, sec, ipr, fldseq int); CREATE INDEX valuekey on keyword (value, key); The value field is a string, max 15 bytes. The key field is a string of fixed-width 10 bytes. There are about 3.5 million records to be indexed. By comparison, indexing on either of these fields separately took only 2-3 minutes. Why would it be so much longer for a multi-column index? Thanks! -- Stephen Toney Systems Planning [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.systemsplanning.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----------------------------------------------------------------------------