how to tune up this query?

I have a 3 million records table. I want to retrieve the first 1000 records of the lowest number of priority. The query below is extremely slow. I am suspecting it's because the subquery is producing 200k records and it needs to sort the 200k records.

SELECT id, name, priority FROM
(SELECT id, name, priority FROM table_name WHERE stage = 'start' and state = 1 ORDER BY stage ASC) WHERE rownum <= 1000;

Is there any way to tune up this? Or should I write this query in another way?

Thanks,
Susan Received on Wed Jan 29 2003 - 22:13:29 CST