With the increasing use and size of phylogenies, the output of reconstruction programs must be stored for future reference, in which case post-tree analyses such as consensus must be run from a database. We set out to determine whether such analyses can be run at a reasonable cost; we chose consensus (which summarizes the information from many trees into a single tree) because of its general applicability and because it creates a severe demand on the database by requiring examination of every edge of every tree.