> snipped much discussion about EXTERNAL storage and substring speed Joe and Tom,
Thanks for all of your help; I went back to my (nearly) production database, and executed the `update feature set residues = residues ||'';` and then redid my benchmark. Here's a summary of the results: substr in perl 0.83sec/op substring on default text column 0.24sec/op substring on EXTERNAL column 0.0069sec/op There's that 2 orders of magnitude improvement I was looking for! Thanks again, Scott -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Scott Cain, Ph. D. [EMAIL PROTECTED] GMOD Coordinator (http://www.gmod.org/) 216-392-3087 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
