instead of SELECT TOP: cursors or nested queries?

I'm using Oracle 9i. I need an equivalent of Sql Server's SELECT TOP with ORDER BY.
I have found two different approaches to do this. 1- Declaring a cursor and fetching the rows I need. 2- Using a nested query to order the table in the inner select and rownum in the outer.

Both solutions work right, but I want to know which has a better performance when my tables become large, i.e. more than 10K records. I guess that if I create an index on the column I order by there should be no significant differences in performance between those solutions, but I'm not sure.

Can anybody give some advice? Received on Wed Jan 07 2004 - 15:33:16 CST