Mark,
You said that Search is on the list. I have been doing some researching on what is being used now "TableSorter" and it does have a search feature which I was able to add and test and it is fairly easy to add to the current views. Could we get rid of html tables all together and use json? Switch from html tables to JSON. HTML tables are very limited, if you make the switch to json the possibilities will be endless as there are numerous js libraries and plugins based off of jquery that have very strong table capabilities.
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2009/06/ ... index.html here is an example of the Prototype as seen on the cnn site. I realize that even the protools solution won't solve the problem of too many records being retrieved at once. The protools nor the TableSorter are meant for thousands of db records as there will be long page loads and timeouts the more data there is to display. I can make some suggestions that will give you nice search capabilities by using php + javascript libraries to solve problems such as queries taking too long/timing out and all the search, filter features you could possibly need. Here is a demo of a library called Jqgrid.
http://trirand.com/blog/jqgrid/jqgrid.htmlExtJS also has similar if not more powerful grid examples
http://www.extjs.com/products/js/?ref=l ... bluebutton -> click on Grids section to view the demos
Both of these solutions are kept up to date rather frequently.