PW,

I don't use * in my actual query. The exmaple I have provided is more of a general problem, the queries I have in practice can have very involved WHERE...

Eddie,

This is interesting. In most cases I would be returning 1,000's if not 10,000's of results so your suggestion is well worth trying out.

At the moment I have PK...

Julie. Your method seems to solve the speed issue in most cases. Queries that took 10 minutes now take 3 seconds !

However as the WHERE clause becomes more complex looking...

thank you for the quick replies.

The query above is just psuedo code, but I have indexes on the ID's (int) used in the join. I don't think I can do...

Thanks KH and Jesper. This was what I was looking for and has saved me a lot of head scratching !

If the Master and Detail Tables have a lot of...

Thanks for the reply. I don't think I was very clear, I have updated the original post slightly.

Your example would return three records, I need to return one record which...