Originally posted by hrishy
In 8.0.5 since analytical functions are not avaliable the above query is the way to go.
As I already said, this is the slowest of all possible top-n solutions for 8.0.5. Also you might be surprised that sometimes your query will not return 5 records (for top-5 example of yours), it might return you anything between 0 and 5 records. If for example on emp table you wanted two highest salaries, you would only get one with your query, i.e.

EMPNO SAL
---------- ----------
7839 5000

If you want to check some more efficient top-N possibilities in pre-8i, you might check this thread:
http://www.dbasupport.com/forums/sho...threadid=10310