David,
In terms of "which is better" for sorting inside a program, working with
in-memory strings should be faster than writing to disk. And with less
than a thousand names, it probably won't be noticeably faster whether
you UPCASE() each time you insert, or maintain a separate UPCASE'd variable.
I'm guessing that you'll also have an ID value associated with the name;
that means LOCATE'ing on values. Field-marks in Universe (and I'm
guessing in Unidata too) are optimized for traversing back and forth.
Value-marks aren't, so when you INSERT a value after a LOCATE, the
run-machine has to start at character one and find each value until it
hits the specific value mark count. Ideally, you should be using
field-mark delimited lists, but practically I don't think it would be
noticeable.
rex
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