PL/SQL statement for QUICKLY getting the "next available value"

Hello all,

First time posting to this group.

I have what seems to be a simple question, but we can't seem to find a simple answer. We have a big table (about 3 million rows) that consist of only two cols. Here is the describe of table PVI_UUID...

Name                            Null?    Type
------------------------------- -------- ----
PVI                             NOT NULL VARCHAR2(9)
UUID                                     VARCHAR2(38)
USED_FLAG                                VARCHAR2(1)

All we're trying to do is select from the table the next available row that has a Used_Flag = 'N'. We've tried:

SELECT MIN(PVI)
FROM PVI_UUID
WHERE USED_FLAG = 'N' This works fine, but the execution time is over 1 minute! Is there any way we can optimize this select?

Thanks in advance...

DJ Received on Sat Jul 15 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT