Character based searchs in isql 4.1/online 5.0

We have a performance problem related to searching a character based credit card number. We have a table with 153,000 credit card entries, each card field has 14 characters. We need to do a look-up search on specific card number as quickly as possible. Current searches use the following example of select in 4GL or isql: SELECT customer_id FROM card_table WHERE card_numberMATCHES "12345678901234" This search is taking about 1 min, 20 sec. Much to long! What do we do? Change the field type to a real number? We don't think an index on the field will help much, but we will try. Is there different SQL approach to speed this up? Our environment is: OnLine 5.0.0.uc2, isql 4.10.uc2, esql/c 4.10.ud1, 486/33PC, 16MB RAM, Interactive Unix S5R3.2,v3.0.1. please respond to hanan@abq.bdm.com or wright@abq.bdm.com Thanks in advance. Jeffrey D. Hanan hanan@abq.bdm.com Phone:(505) 848-5362 Fax: (505) 848-5720