RE: query for top customer

Thanks Greg,

;-) I needed that! I just got into PL/SQL mode and went for it....LOL

Cheers,
Kev.

"hit any user to continue"

Kevin Thomas
Technical Analyst
Deregulation Services
Calanais Ltd.
(2nd Floor East - Weirs Building)
Tel: 0141 568 2377
Fax: 0141 568 2366
http://www.calanais.com

-----Original Message-----
Sent: 11 September 2001 05:30
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

> Here's me publishing war-n-peace to solve
> a problem that takes 4 lines of code...

True, but your PL/SQL solution is fast.

Using a correlated subquery to find the top three rows works fine against EMP, but what happens when it goes against a table with 100,000 rows? This subquery runs 100,000 times:

where 3 > (select count(*) from tablea y where y.sales > x.sales)

The correlated subquery solution will run forever and a day, and an index won't help. If you can't do an in-line view, forget the correlated subquery, no matter how short it is, and use PL/SQL.

Am I missing something here?

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