Best setup for this table?

[David Robinson]

I have a client with a requirement to build a rather large table. My initial thoughts are concerned with performance so I thought I'd ask the experts!

Each record will hold around 40 fields. 32 of these are for specific data types and can hold around 100 different numbers (though the list is constantly growing). Let's say the fields are A1 to H2 (32 fields).

Searches are done by relating one record to another, by the specific data types. A positive match would be one that matches a minimum of 20 fields (fixed variable in case it needs to be changed).

The way I see it, it's going to run 32 queries against each record (could eventually be millions of records) so it soon gets to be a very fat query.

So how do places like Google do it? Surely this is a similar DB query? Should I rethink the DB structure, or the way I store the specific data?

Thanks,

David