Hi dws,

You make a very fair point with respect to not optimising prior to understanding that the code works first and that the overhead associated with fetching the data from the database may well be significant. To check this out I have profiled the execution of my script. Here is a clip from the results of dprofpp:

> dprofpp
Total Elapsed Time = -82.1369 Seconds
  User+System Time = 497.6071 Seconds
Exclusive Times
%Time ExclSec CumulS #Calls sec/call Csec/c  Name
 35.9   179.0 175.93 105289   0.0002 0.0002  DBI::st::execute
 33.9   168.9 137.38 105266   0.0000 0.0000  main::GetMinimalDataType
 snip...
[download]

As you can see the majority of the time is spent in DBI::st::execute but a significant portion of the time is taken by the GetMinimalDataType function. Any savings here would be very useful.

Many thanks for the feedback.

Regards,
Dom.

Update: Please note that this profile is on a small test set of data and not on the real volume.