Hi all, many interesting points here!
Corion, I do like your approach and probably use it at some point; however, in order to create the tables correctly, I would need ALL of the unique values, in order to see if e.g. VARCHAR(15) is enough, or if 10,000 rows from the hundreds of millions that this big file has, have e.g. VARCHAR(16). So, as I see it, not really much to do, except using uniq directly, without sorting...
The values vary largely, but, as correctly pointed out, they are biology-related data (on a bioinformatics project), so some of them are e.g. chromosome number positions (so, only numbers), others are text etc. And most of them are repeated of course. However, I really need to know all the unique values before I can design my table scheme..

In reply to Re^2: Possible faster way to do this? by Anonymous Monk
in thread Possible faster way to do this? by Anonymous Monk

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