Search Cursor vs Selection

[MKF62]

Has anybody tested if one is faster than the other? Say you have 300,000 records to go through and you want to find all the records that have nulls in a field, would selecting with a "IS NULL" where clause be faster than a search cursor running through? Or would the difference be negligible? 

[JoshuaBixby · Accepted solution]

Select Layer By Attribute will be, or should be, significantly faster since it is both compiled code as well as it pushes the execution to the data store tier closer to the data itself.  That said, for 300,000 records I am not sure it makes a big difference either way. 

[JoeBorgione]

Try it and time it....