1. A method of locating a prefix in a forwarding database of N number of prefixes, comprising: maintaining 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; and finding a longest prefix match among the prefixes within the selected sub-database.