How to get the difference between two lists?

[Trevor DeVore]

On Apr 4, 2005, at 1:50 PM, Frank D. Engel, Jr. wrote:
>
> If the DB is properly indexed, there is no way that Transcript should 
> be able to perform that kind of sort faster than the DB server.  An 
> SQL server should be able to use an index to perform that kind of sort 
> substantially faster than it could be done by a generic sorting 
> algorithm, such as what Rev would need to use with its 'sort' command.

That was my thought as well which is why I wanted to clarify the 
statement.

> The only major exception is when the client is distributed among 
> multiple computers (different people accessing the server 
> simultaneously with the client on separate machines per user) and the 
> database server is on hardware which is being very heavily used.  In 
> this case, the client may be able to sort the incoming data faster 
> than the DB can, only due to the server being slowed down by a heavy 
> processing load of multiple other users.  However, there would need to 
> be a rather extreme number of users for a correctly indexed database 
> to slow down to this point, at least with a query like that one, since 
> the index should allow the server to just read off the needed data in 
> a sorted order to begin with, rather than needing to take any extra 
> steps to sort it at all.  Complex views might complicate the matter 
> somewhat, but last time I checked, MySQL did not support views (a 
> somewhat strange omission for such a popular db server...)

Views were just barely added with the 5.0 release.


-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Multimedia
trevor at mangomultimedia.com