>Thank you. You experience and logic pretty much confirms for me that using the query without TOP and then simply GO TOP on the resulting query (created without TOP 1) will not adversely affect the time.

Are you using SQL Server or VFP? You can also try

select T.* from myTable T inner join (select top 1 PK from myTable ... ORDER ...) X ON T.PK = X.PK

This may perform better.

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Also, if we're talking SQL Server, then, of course, if you only need 1 record, you select just one records.