Question

I have a column in my table that stores max 2 characters. For eg. B,AK,SE etc.

Suppose I have two rows in that table, one having ‘K’ and other having ‘BA’ as a value.

Requirement in my project is such that I have to get the maximum value from the table based on the no. of characters in case there is a difference in the length. In this case, maximum value will be ‘BA’ not ‘K’.

But when I use ‘order by column desc‘ with rownum = 1 in my query, ‘K’ is returned as rownum 0th value.

If I have values ‘D’,’BA’,’AK’,’C’ then output should be ‘BA’,’AK’,’C’,’D’
Just want to know if there is any way I can fulfill my requirement?

Answer 1

Simplest way could be:

ORDER BY length(<col_name>) desc

UPDATE – if you need to order by the value also, you can do:

ORDER BY length(<col_name>) desc, <col_name> desc