1. A method of locating a prefix in a forwarding database of N number of prefixes, wherein the database is provided within a memory device, the method comprising: maintaining, in the memory device, a pointer table having a set of spear prefixes that point to a respective set of sub-databases; finding a longest spear prefix match among the spear prefixes within the pointer table; selecting a sub-database of prefixes from a set of sub-databases pointed to by the longest matching spear prefix within the pointer table, wherein said selecting comprises accessing only a portion of the memory device containing the sub-database pointed to by the longest matching spear prefix within the pointer table and not accessing any other portion of the memory such that power consumption is reduced and a speed at which a longest prefix match is located within the database is increased; and finding the longest prefix match among the prefixes within the selected sub-database, wherein the longest prefix match within the selected sub database determines a next hop address.