which is faster?

I was wondering which of the following would be more efficient?

    select min(col1) from table1
or

    select col1 from table1 order by col1 (and just get the first record)

The first is what we started with and seems really slow with a table of a thousand records. col1 is a varchar(40) field.

Thanks for any help.
Mary Received on Thu Jan 21 1999 - 11:32:00 CST