has anyone looked at burstsort https://sourceforge.net/projects/burstsort
they claim that "Copy-Burstsort is a sorting algorithm for strings that is cache-efficient. Burstsort and its variants are much faster than Quicksort and Radixsort especially on large datasets. Copy-Burstsort works best for sorting short strings such as genomes and words" if the speed claim is true, and there are no other bad effects, like for example very bad memory use, we could try to talk the author into allowing us to include it under BSD licens (currently it is GPL) ---------------- Hannu ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq