You need just one record from a database. Say, the record for a particular transaction number. You need this information quite frequently (say, from your web application). However, every time you go and search it, it is taking several seconds.
There is something wrong. Just to pick one row should be done quite fast, even if your database is substantially big.
Did you look at the query plan? Is it using an index?
Not using an index? If you do have an index on this column, give hints to the query to use it, re-run (do not forget to execute DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS before every time you run a query, especially when you are doing performance testing) and check the time. If it is doing fine, save the query that way to force it to use the index every time you call this query later.
You don’t have any index on that column? Create a nonclustered index on it (assuming you have some clustered index on something more important). It should be fine now.
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