13. An apparatus for sequence analysis comprising: memory configured to store relations in a relational database; and a processor configured to carry out a comparison of at least one query sequence and at least one subject sequence, each stored as relations in the relational database, as one or more Structured Query Language (SQL) queries formulated to include at least one join operation, wherein at least one SQL query is formulated with a controls table that specifies parameters of the comparison, and store a result of the comparison as a result relation in the relational database, wherein a number of tuples in the result relation is larger than a multiplicative product of a number of tuples in the at least one subject sequence times a number of tuples in the at least one query sequence, to accommodate multiple points of alignment between each combination of the at least one query sequence and the at least one subject sequence that are compared.
14. An apparatus as in claim 13 wherein each of the query sequences is compared against each of the subject sequences for each of the parameters of the controls table.