Quote:
Hitting a database of 50,000+ tracks


It doesn't matter how many tracks if the database is indexed properly. You said earlier that you're using OLEDB? That kind of suggests that you're using a sensible database.

I can't remember what upper limit the ARM database has (and it's not as high as I'd have liked), but it never suffered from performance problems doing this. It was fully-indexed on most of the interesting fields.

Quote:
27 times (exponentially more if more characters are entered)


No, you misunderstand. The ARM software only hits the database for combinations of the first 3 characters. Then it filters the results itself. This was done precisely to avoid the exponential nature of the search. 3 characters seemed like a good tradeoff between hitting the database and doing the filtering in code.
_________________________
-- roger