Performance is concern, Should use CI?

[eluser]m4rw3r[/eluser]
The problem with all ORM tools is that they iterate over the whole result set before they return the data.

The same counts for CI's Db abstraction, so the fastest code is to use the PHP functions for your database directly.

But you can still use CI for everything else except for that large table (because it is only there the performance gain is noticeable).