I suspect there are a few issues at play. First, with BDB I have to deserialize the entire object to get the UID - while I tell MySQL I'm only interested in 1 c

I suspect there are a few issues at play. First, with BDB I have to deserialize the entire object to get the UID - while I tell MySQL I'm only interested in 1 column. Second, with the simple query I'm literaly just traversing a b-tree - which is the exact same thing that mysql does since I told it to build an index on the relevant column (except with BDB I do so in Lisp instead of raw C).