I am new to MySQL. Please excuse my ignorance if this question has been previously discussed. I was not able to

find an answer to my question by searching the archives.

I have MySQL installed on a dedicated AMD-64 computer with the MS XP Pro operating system.

MS-SQLServer is installed on a 32-bit machine with a slower clock speed. I am running the free binary

distribution of MySQL for testing purposes and have been generally impressed with

MySQL's comparative performance in all but one area.

I am finding that both inner and outer merges take substantially longer with MySQL than with the SQLServer using the same basic code.

In one application a left outer merge between a file with 600,000 records and a file with 4,500,000 records took about 10-15 minutes with

SQLServer and 11 hours with MySQL. I am repeatedly having similar experiences with both inner and outer merges.

Is there any way I can try to improve MySQL's performance with respect to merges? Needless to say, unless I can improve MySQL's

performance, I will not be converting to MySQL at this time.