title: Avoid "SELECT TOP 1" and "ORDER BY" in Queries
body: <p>I have the very table in sql server 2008 with lot of data</p>
  
  <pre><code>|ID|Name|Column_1|Column_2|
  |..|....|........|........|
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>more than 18,000 records. So i need to the the row with the lowest value of <code>Column_1</code> that is date but could by any data type (that is unsorted) so I use these sentence</p>
  
  <pre><code>SELECT TOP 1 ID, Name from table ORDER BY Column_1 ASC
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But this is very very slow. And i think that i don't need to to sort the whole table. My question es how to get the same date with out using <code>TOP 1</code> and <code>ORDER BY</code></p>