Running the following query (SQL Server 2000) the execution plan shows that it used an index seek and Profiler shows it's doing 71 reads with a duration of 0.

select top 1 id from table where name = '0010000546163' order by id desc

Contrast that with the following with uses an index scan with 8500 reads and a duration of about a second.

declare @p varchar(20)
select @p = '0010000546163'
select top 1 id from table where name = @p order by id desc

Why is the execution plan different? Is there a way to change the second method to seek?

thanks

EDIT

Table looks like

CREATE TABLE [table] (
    [Id] [int] IDENTITY (1, 1) NOT NULL ,
    [Name] [varchar] (13) COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NOT NULL)

Id is primary clustered key There is a non-unique index on Name and a unique composite index on id/name There are other columns - left them out for brevity