I'm refactoring a colleague's code, and I have several cases where he's using a cursor to get "the latest row that matches some predicate":

His technique is to write the join as a cursor, order it by the date field descending, open the cursor, get the first row, and close the cursor.

This requires calling a cursor for each row of the result set that drives this, which is costly for many rows. I'd prefer to be able to join, but what something cheaper than a correlated subquery:

select a.id_shared_by_several_rows, a.foo from audit_trail a
where a.entry_date = (select max(a.entry_date) 
                     from audit_trail b 
                     where b.id_shared_by_several_rows = a.id_shared_by_several_rows 
                     );

I'm guessing that since this is a common need, there's an Oracle analytic function that does this?