For unknown reasons, at some point, this function has become very slow. Specifically, if you are doing a globalreplace on a large file--such as adding linefeeds to an EDI file for example--then the results are extremely slow. For example, a 1 megabyte text file will take 5 minutes to process with this function. A 60 meg file with take 5 hours.
By way of comparison, you can do this same sort of thing in .Net in seconds. You can load the file in notepad++ and do a search/replace in just a couple of seconds. Those are acceptable time frames to accomplish this task by todays standard.
We've worked around this issue by fabricating our own version of the of_globalreplace function that uses a database function in sql anywhere. But we are still baffled as to why this function has become so incredibly slow.
Thanks,
Derek
