Thanks for the information. I'll leave the Oracle vs. SOL discussion alone - a very religious subject. While we have a lot of Oracle LDSD is in fact running on SQL. My question is more generic and I really expected to hear the response you provided - that we can't change the behaviour.
I do think this is a bit of a design flaw - but product development may not agree. I don;t see the issue as much one of "SQL tuning" - rather the system is running queries the user does not want, and the scope of the query is often much larger than the user wants. A FTS is a very efficient access method when all of the data is to be considered - and this is the case when none of the limiting selection criteria can be used to find a better access path. The "2nd query" can be easily optimized by effective indexing, etc. - it is thye fact that the initial query needs to run wide open because no limiting criteria can be input before execution.
I do appreciate the confirmation since as much as anything that is what I was looking for, to make sure there was not something Stupid or Obscured I was missing.