The short answer is: No.

Mind you, it does take a small amount of time to move across the columns of a given row, so there is some small benefit to moving shorter and/or more oft-used columns towards the beginning of the row. Here is a thread where we discuss some of these issues: http://www.dbasupport.com/forums/sho...threadid=29359 (a lengthy read, but good info).

In your exact case, however, there will be no difference whatsoever. First, understand that column order in the WHERE clause does not matter at all (read: 99% of the time). Now, I am assuming that the optimizer is using the index in question. Therefore, the optimizer will use the index to get the ROWIDs for the rows that satisfy the specified predicates. It will then use the ROWIDs to get to the physical rows, *not* the 3 column values. Effectively, it will not be looking at those 3 columns *in the table* at all, so their physical location within the row is irrelevant (for this particular usage).

Make sense?

Note that there are many other things that could be done. As I said in the thread I linked above, switching to numeric IDs would be particularly beneficial here, but that's a topic for another day ;D

- Chris