Maybe you should consider transforming the data to structure it a bit. Have a unique identifier per object and arrays for each seen characteristic with (value,

Maybe you should consider transforming the data to structure it a bit. Have a unique identifier per object and arrays for each seen characteristic with (value, id), and it's reverse index. Then decompose the processing of each object to sub-problems matching n-way the characteristics. It doesn't have to be in SQL, though. I'd try a columnar RDBMS. YMMV