Hi,
These are few things which i have experimented never mention explicit SORT always use a field name
SORT<ITAB>BY<FIELD> this increases performance in sort
To Increase performance In READ BINARY SEARCH addition is one of the ways.
In general if you compare SORT + READ with READ read will be better,but if you compare as a program which contains FOR ALL ENTRIES , DELETE ADJACENT DUPLICATES ,READ, etc which have sort as a prerequisite then you will sure find a lot of difference in performance .