[AndreT]

I don't see the code he used for testing anywhere, so cannot exactly say about the speed difference.

But well, I was just thinking, there are some spots you could address, such as why do you load the callback/format parameter data if you're not sure in the first place what sort of a query you're about to handle (some queries would not even require to allocate memory for these strings or pass them on to containers).

(By the way I got a plugin of my own released a bit hidden somewhere on my server's site... only the necessary stuff and adequate speed results... no idea why I'm saying this though)

edit 2: and yes, iterating through a set of strings and comparing them (although depending on the system architecture the comparisons can be very fast as well) will always be slower than accessing the row by its index.