Please re-read my explanations in this thread and the other referenced threads to fully understand the solution.

Your solution won't work if the result set needs to be ordered, and windowing generally only makes sense with an ordered result set. However, if ordering is not necessary, then your solution will work. I must admit I find it a little humorous that your complaint has to do with what you consider an extraneous layer to the original query while your example truly has one - checking for rownum>0 is definitely extraneous . Don't worry, I know where you were going, just found it funny.

Also, Shiva never actually posted a query, so I'm not actually sure which query you were referring to, not that it really matters though.

- Chris