>Oddly, I ended up with the 3-character limit myself on a half million record table where the users were searching for all matches. It was a compromise with the users wanting 2, but they didn't like the delay.

Excatly, after all, with a million records table, what need can there be to have a subset with only the first letter or first 2 characters. Also, even if we let the user to type one or 2 characters, they will still have to precise their search. So, it's just a way of doing things. I have the same here on the Universal Thread.