At 16:14 07.07.2003 +1200, you wrote:

>The only thing I can get working is to use an inner select statement
>using min (A.Number) - except that it takes 6 minutes instead of 6
>seconds - which is a tad too slow.

Exactly what does this SQL look like? What does the query plan look like?
Are you using InterBase or Firebird (version would also be good to know)?
What is A.Number - is it unique or starting at 1 for each owner? And
finally, table sizes, indexes and selectivity?

Set