Hi, I have a very large table with over 1000 records and 200 columns. When I try to retreive records matching some criteria in the WHERE clause using SELECT statement it takes a lot of time. But most of the time I just want to select a single record that matches the criteria in the WHERE clause rather than all the records. I guess there should be a way to select just a single record and exit which would minimize the retrieval time. I tried ROWNUM=1 in the WHERE clause but it didn't really work cause I guess the engine still checks all the records even after finding the first record matching the WHERE criteria. Is there a way to optimize in case if I want to select just a few records? Thanks in advance. Edit: I am using oracle 10g.