Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jato!herron.uucp!jbrown
From: jbrown@herron.uucp (Jordan Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Avoiding SET FILTER TO command
Message-ID: <104@herron.uucp>
Date: 31 Jul 89 02:27:32 GMT
References: <9636@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <472@uncmed.med.unc.edu>
Reply-To: jbrown@jato.jpl.nasa.gov
Lines: 21

In article <9636@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>, englandr@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Scott Englander) writes:
> Let's say you want the record where field1 = x and field2 = y, where x
> and y are expressions appropriate to the respective field type.  Then
> all you need to do is
> 
> LOCATE FOR field1 = x .and. field2 = y
> 
> This might still take a while, but should be faster than SET FILTER TO.
> Hope this helps.

It shouldn't be any faster.  It should be exactly the same speed.

The real answer is to index on the pair of fields and seek on the
concatenation.

index on last+first to lf
seek "Brown           Jordan"

if you don't have an such an index and don't want to maintain it,
oh well, you're going to do a linear search.  This won't be fun
using either SET FILTER or LOCATE.