Rob

I'm really sorry to hear about your health problems, and I hope it all works out for you.

It would really help if you could post the DDL for your table, including indexes and constraints. My first thought was that if the race is uniquely identified by its name ("Grand National") then you will have a unique constraint on it and therefore an index as well (assuming the database is properly designed), and it would be sufficient to search on that. Then it occurred to me that your table might store individual instances of the race (Grand National 2012, Grand National 2011 etc). So I think that the answer is indeed "it depends", but we can help a lot more if we know how your table is structured.

John