>Assuming a memo field in a cursor is HUGE, and I want to look for a string: 'my string' what would be the fastest and least memory hog way of doing that? I think for sure that $ is not it... is alines() better? It won't be an exact match, in other words, I need to see if 'my string' is in there, but it may be in there as 'this is my string.' etc...
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>I don't need to know where in the memo field it is, just whether it is there or not.

I would expect $ to be fine. Any string search is going to be fast once the contents of the memo field are fetched, and that part is unavoidable.