Fastest access on varchar keyed table...

Hi,

we have a table like
table emp (

    fullname varchar2(250),
    age number(3)
    )
with a few thousand entries
(on a simple, small "default installation" DB)

No matches on other tables are made. The table is written once/rarely and read very often.

What is the fastest way to get the age of "John Doe" ?

A simple "select age from emp where fullname='John Doe'" ? Could it make the query faster if we extended the table by a

  lengthofname number(3)

and do a

select age from emp where lengthofname=8 and fullname='John Doe' ?

-- 
                                       Andreas
Who doesn't live can never die