Manfred,
> I'd be honestly interested in the circumstances where you made that
> observation.
Hmmmm ... one of my database involves a "crosstab" converstion where there
were 13 possible values, and the converted table is heavily indexed. For
that case, I found using CASE statements to be slower.
For your example, how do the statistics change if you increase the number of
levels to 15 and put an index on them?
--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco