If those are rows in a database, I agree with dws, just let database do it.

If that particular column is not indexed, I suggest index it, as you need it.

"order by" is usually not too expansive, especially when it only involves indexed range scan.

Depends on your database, some database directly support syntax that allows to retrieve first N rows.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Heap sorting in perl by pg
in thread Heap sorting in perl by blakem

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