Online 5.04: Miserable Performace

I am working with Online 5.04 in a Sun Spark 10 (SunOS 4.1.3). The following query (run from isql) takes for ever to complete with no users in the system. In fact, after 4 or 5 minutes I interrupted it. SELECT count(*) FROM contacts, companies WHERE companies.active = -1 AND contacts.active = -1 AND companies.company_id = contacts.company_id AND (description MATCHES "*cancer*lung*" OR interest MATCHES "*cancer*lung*") the "description" and "interest" fields are both CHAR(5000), one in the contacts table and the other in the companies table. The same query against an Access database with Memo fields for "description" and "interest" takes between 10-15 seconds. The Access database is sitting in a Novell Server (Intel 486) and I am accessing it using Delphi/ODBC. What is going on? It seems to me that Informix fails terribly with searches of long char fields. I understand that the wild cards in the MATCHES statement force the engine to read the entire field. So what? Access is forced to do the same. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you Gabriel -- Gabriel Beccar-Varela gabriel.beccar-varela@ucop.edu