One other idea. I did this before in MySQL and using the full formulas in SQL was too much, and computing them all in perl was annoying, so instead I computed a square of the right size, found all the matches in that with SQL then refined that down once in my perl script. I hope that doesn't sound like raving lunacy! ;) Shortened: Do a quicker less accurate search in your database, then refine the listing in perl. That is unless of course your database has native support then it is probably going to win speed contests by doing it purely in your database.