Converting strings to ASCII codes to increase search

Hi,

We have a system that contains 50M customer records. We need to repeatedly search this table to see if the new customer is actually a new customer or has been a customer of ours in the past.

Some of the development guys have come up with the idea of converting some of the fields to their ASCII code representation as they think this will be quicker that doing straight string comparisons.

I have been trying to do some research around this and can't find anything that supports this.

Has anyone come across this in the past or have any ideas.

Thanks
Simon Received on Mon Feb 19 2007 - 05:47:53 CST