[wp-hackers] Sorting on Custom Fields

[Kevin Newman]

  I'm creating a plugin which will extend the post with a ton of custom 
fields (50 or so per post, mostly booleans, some numbers and some text). 
I'll need to be able to ORDER BY (to use SQL terminology) these fields 
(as well as search on them).

There is a plugin called wp-smart-sort which seems to do sorting by 
looping through the results of a custom query and storing the post data 
in an array and ordering that in memory ("seems to", because I didn't 
take the code apart all that thoroughly).

I'm leaning toward using a custom table, because sorting in server 
memory seems inefficient, and I have a crazy number of values anyway. 
But serializing those in a single custom field, doesn't seem crazy either.

Anyway, I'd love to see opinions on this. :-)

Kevin N.