Suggestions on how to efficiently search a large table

I have a billion+ row table that I need to do queries on.

The table looks something like this:

   item

      id  number
      process1_id  number
      process2_id  number
      process3_id  char(35)

I need to perform multiple processes on each item. When I process an item, I then set the corresponding column with the result of the process.

I need to do queries like the following to determine which processes I haven't completed yet:

   select * from item where process1_id is null or process2_id is null or process3_id is null

Any recommendations on how to index or query such a table to get good performance? The cardinality of all the process*_id columns is very high.

Thanks. Received on Wed Nov 14 2007 - 19:55:41 CST