Comment 8 for bug 1695911

Sorry Bill, I was thinking that the unique index was doing double duty and providing a search function. If not, then the MD5 way seems fine. Do you see any reason not to do it like this:

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX browse_entry_sort_value_value_key
    ON metabib.browse_entry
    USING btree (MD5(value || sort_value));

to avoid the doubled storage cost and only call the MD5 function once per row on each insert/update?

(NOTE: I tested the speed of a SHA-1 digest, which is less collision-y, but DIGEST(xxx,'sha1') is about 40% slower than the direct MD5() function.)