Sometimes a database approach is not the right one. Years ago, I thought that I would have a look at various database products to get an idea of how they operated. dBaseII was one of them; that will inform some of how long ago this was.
Obviously I needed some ready-made data to populate test databases. I managed to get hold of a list of place names and their STD telephone prefix codes. Over 4300 entries, so a sensible number to test on the computer hardware to hand at the time.
The fastest lookup was by software included in MS-DOS. A simple batch file, running the FIND program. Even with everything on floppy disks, it returned results of a full text search of the plain text file in less than two seconds.
Comparing that with packages which took many seconds to load before they would even accept a request, guess why that batch file has been in use ever since!
