sql query problem related to rownum. please help

i need to do a top-n query after doing a sorting using order by. the query i am using is as below

select * from
(select * from table
 order by colA,colB)
where rownum < 100

i am having almost 1 lakh records in the table and because of the two levels of the query it is taking lot of time. i want to know is there any better way of achieving this like doing it in single query or something. Received on Tue Feb 22 2005 - 23:43:17 CST