Re: query for top customer

> 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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Author: Greg Moore
  INET: sqlgreg_at_pacbell.net

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