Question

I am looking for a way to select a single row from a MySQL table.
One of the columns contains a hexidecimal value and I only want to SELECT the row which contains the largest hex value.

So for instance there are three rows like:

id   hex_value   comments
 1   01          some comments...
 2   1A          some comments...
 3   03          some comments...

So the resultant returned rows contents would be id 2 as the value 1A is the greatest.

If anyone could point me in the right direction it would be most appreciated.

Thank you
Mark

Answer 1

As long as the hexadecimal strings are the same length (as in your example), they are comparable as strings, so you can just sort them:

select id, hex_value, comments
from TheTable
order by hex_value desc
limit 1

Note: You need to use desc when sorting to get the highest value first.