i have a table that contains large text fields. on a variety of pages, i'm interested in about 8 fields from a record in this table. for each of these records, if the record has data, i want to display a link. I don't need the data from these fields, i just need to know if they contain data.
therefore, i would like to create a query which just grabs a record with a particular id from this table and have the results be a simple yes or no for each field of that field contains any data for this particular record.
my reason for this is because these text fields are fairly large (between 1KB and 5Kb each). I'm worried that if I have a lot of simultaneous users that I might start chewing up RAM unnecessarily.
ideally this solution would consume as little memory and computational effort as possible.
