g'day all,

I have two tables, Big & Small that I need to join on the variable P7 and must keep all the records from Big.

Big has 135m rows, 14 variables, all about $10, with the key variable P7 having 60k distinct, and evenly distributed values. Small has 170k rows and 2 variables. The key variable P7 is *almost* distinct. Left Join on P7 looked the obvious choice but on my (average) PC it takes approx 2.5 hours to run.

I've been trawling though this ng and have found suggestions on improving the run time is situations like this based on a number of methods, including; indexing, increasing Bufsize & BufNo, using hash joins etc etc and while I realise that there's no 'One size fits all' solution would anyone care to give their opinion on a 'best option' here to help out a slow-moving 9.1 user?

cheers Phil