SQL to retrieve most recent row meeting criteria

I've completed a port of my application to Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and Teradata. That's been a learning effort of considerable proportions. But I do have an Oracle question.

I want to retrieve the most recent row from a table meeting a specific criteria. In the example below, I want the most recent zipcode of the individual with a specific email address. The table has an ID column which increments automatically as rows are added. Right now I'm using:

select zip from journal where id=(select max(id) from journal where email='xxx_at_yyy.com')

This works but, even with optimized indexing, it requires two hits of the database to process. In SQL Server I was able to accomplish this in one hit using their TOP syntax. Is there a more efficient way to accomplish this in Oracle? Received on Thu Jul 22 2004 - 04:45:34 CDT