>>The goal is to improve the performance of some very slow REPLACE, SELECT, and LOCATE statements whose performance is terrible on these large tables. The methods that I'm trying to improve performance on are preexising and I'm not trying to rewrite them..I'm just trying to speed up the slowest parts of it and indexes seemed the natural way to improve the performance.
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>>As far as the real reason behind using such a large index..I have various information during various parts of the program and thus need to find a way to "search" through the views on different criteria...
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>huh? locate for command is fast if there are all aprropriate indices that match left part of index expression.
>and i think that locate for field1=key1 and field2=key2 will be blazingly fast when there are indices for field1 and field2 and index on deleted().

With index on DELETED() you're going into the battle field <g>